


Blood Price

by NanDibble



Series: The Blood Series [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Astral Projection, Demigods, Dimension Travel, F/M, Original Character(s), Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-05
Updated: 2005-11-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 14:57:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 67,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9187211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NanDibble/pseuds/NanDibble
Summary: Spike and Dawn, between them, can open portals to just about anywhere. Giles wants to know where Ethan was sent. Angel wants to find The Destroyer. Buffy wants Christmas to be perfect, but a Demigod keeps attacking the house. Possibly all these things (except Christmas) could be resolved with an expedition into Quar'toth, called "the Doorless Dimension."AU, sequel toBlood Rites.There are 9 chapters in this permanently unfinished story.





	1. Let Me Count the Ways

Mooching along the overgrown abandoned rail spur, hands in jeans pockets and head down, Spike halted.  
  
Dawn came trotting up behind, the beam of her flashlight painting the gravel between the rotted-out ties. “Something?”  
  
“Yeah, something….” Spike shut his eyes, trying to localize the tingle in the air. “Should be better at this,” he muttered, unconsciously tilting his shoulders, leaning, trying to align with what he felt.  
  
“I expect it’s like dowsing,” Dawn commented practically. “The head knowledge can’t help until you’ve digested it: made it body knowledge.”  
  
“Yeah,” Spike responded, not really listening, still trying to align. Which actually wasn’t possible, he knew that. It was like sun-knowledge, closest thing--a sense of angle and direction, except that neither was cogged to the geometries of rusting parallel tracks lancing off into the weedy dark or the chilly wind gusting from the sea or stark stars overhead only slightly dimmed by Sunnydale’s haze of lights down in the valley.  
  
It was just off his left shoulder--a tingling seam in the air. At a cross-angle to everything. Facing it didn’t work: made him lose it. He had to stand crosswise to it. No reason why, just how it was.  
  
“We gonna try this one?”  
  
“Me first, Bit. In case there’s no air. Like the last one,” Spike responded absently. “Won’t be but a second, you stay put.”  
  
“I’ve got my taser and my stake,” Dawn asserted, annoyed with the care he took of her…dragging her out of her cosy bed about three on a Saturday night in December, all hush and shivers, prospecting with her flashlight for anything interesting along the rail bed while he dowsed for shimmers and the both of them therefore visible for a good mile, roundabout.  
  
“Turn off the torch.”  
  
“No. It’s creepy. And I found another one!” Juggling flashlight and taser, she dug in a bulging jacket pocket and proudly produced a rusted railroad spike.  
  
Blinking at her, trying not to lose the torque of the dimensional rift, Spike said, “That’s fine. Add it to your collection. Stuff it through your nose. Turn off the torch, Bit. You mind, or I’m not bringing you out any more.”  
  
“Sure, that’s a scary threat. Without me, you can’t budge an inch,” she retorted smugly.  
  
Two vamps sprang out of the ditch, on Dawn before Spike could lunge between. He slammed one away and risked turning his back long enough to stake the one Dawn was flailing at with the flashlight in one hand and the spike in the other. As the dust exploded and Dawn started screeching, Spike didn’t whirl back quite fast enough to keep the other dumb fledge from taking him down, slamming into the cinders. They rolled and struggled, the fledge pounding at Spike with a fist-sized chunk of gravel while Spike tried to double his knees up enough to loft the vamp away with his boots. Dawn should have juggled through her trash and unlimbered the taser long since, but a glance told Spike she’d stayed clear, hopping and wailing like a siren, and another vamp was coming in, drawn by the noise, most like. So best do this one fast.  
  
Twisting, Spike bit the fledge’s rock-holding hand mostly off at the wrist. Enough distraction that Spike could finally pull his knees up under the heavier vamp and then violently uncoil, flinging the fledge off straight at the approaching vamp. The fledge burst into dust that Spike went through in a flying dive, to get between the new vamp and Dawn and what the hell was she doing, just standing like a lump? As he hit, he was deflected aside and tumbled into the ditch, up the next second and back, but Dawn had got in his way, waving and jumping like trying to scare off a cow…and he belatedly recognized the vamp as Mike.  
  
Covered with vamp dust and blood, some of it his, angry at Dawn for being useless and at himself for being distracted and letting them get jumped, angry at the fledges for being too dumb to know him for a vamp and for himself, and angry at his claimed childe for being there and seeing it, Spike sagged a moment where he stood. Having waved off the attack, Dawn relaxed, turning away. Lunging past her, he slammed Mike a good one in the gut. Mike had anticipated and mostly faded back ahead of the blow, but Spike hadn’t actually hit him all that hard anyway and stalked past, stumbling a little on the ends of ties, rubbing at his face with his sleeve.  
  
Trailing a prudent distance behind, Dawn explained anxiously, “I couldn’t. You were tumbling and wrestling around and I couldn’t tell who was who. And if I got you by mistake, we were both toast.”  
  
“Should’a turned off the torch when I told you,” Spike snarled. He suddenly dropped down on the curve of rail bed, fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, hand cupping his temple and waiting for the gash to seal and quit smearing blood into his eyes so that he was nearly as blind as Dawn. She’d finally turned off the flashlight.  
  
The night was again quiet, cold, and still.  
  
Seating herself in a sulky fling about a yard away, perched right on the rail, long overalled legs drawn up almost to her chin, Dawn hurled away a piece of gravel. “Well, excuuuuse me for not being able to see much on bad footing in the middle of the freaking night!”  
  
The blood had finally let up. Spike wearily rubbed at his forehead a final time with his sleeve, then looked favorlessly across at Mike, comfortably crouched on his heels the other side of Dawn, knowing Spike wouldn’t come at him again.  
  
Answering the implicit question, Mike commented mildly, “I was in the neighborhood,” assembling a different sort of cigarette and lighting it with a kitchen match. Not having to look to know Spike’s recoil of annoyed disbelief, Mike went on, more truthfully, “Heard the bike. Then saw it was Dawn with you, not the Slayer. So I drifted along to see what was up, this hour of the night.”  
  
His tone was matter-of-fact, calm; but the implication was critical of Spike's taking Dawn on late night patrols. Didn’t need saying: they both knew. They attended to their smokes while Spike made himself settle further, letting game-face flow into his human mask.  
  
Maybe Mike had the right of it: that first vamp _had_ got at Dawn, after all. Spike wasn’t gonna dispute it with him, anyway--not all that sure, himself, he should be letting Dawn accompany him into situations that could turn risky even though it was as much her idea as his.  
  
Dawn spoke up: “We’re hunting natural portals. Mapping them, pretty much. And going through for a quick look around, to see what they’re like. One was all crystalline, like sections of a glacier, and there wasn’t any air. I felt like I had frost on my eyeballs. And another was underwater.”  
  
“Salt or fresh?” Mike inquired, and let out breath and smoke in a slow, controlled hiss.  
  
“I didn’t notice.” Dawn sounded worried she might lose points for that, like not knowing the mean air speed of a laden African swallow.  
  
“Salt,” Spike put in. “Ocean.”  
  
“Why haul the girl along--”  
  
Dawn interrupted quickly, “He has to. He couldn’t get through by himself. That takes a Key.”  
  
Mike didn’t think Spike was careful enough with Dawn. Spike didn’t see what fucking business it was of Mike’s what they did or how or when they did it. Again, didn’t need saying. They marinated in their separate irritated silences awhile.  
  
Mike finally said, “Slayer know about this?” which was an implicit threat to tell her.  
  
“No,” Dawn blurted, “it’s a surprise. Or will be, when we find the right place. It’s there, somewhere. Spike dreamed it.” Twisting around, she set her hands on Mike’s arm. “You won’t blab it, right? Ruin the surprise?”  
  
“I don’t _blab,_ ” Mike responded stiffly, when just the opposite was the case and they all knew it. “Got no call to tell the Slayer nothing. She ain’t nothing to me.”  
  
“You could help us look,” Dawn suggested eagerly, since they now had to keep Mike sweet or he’d blow the whole thing. “We could wait while Spike goes through. Or if we find a good one, you could come with!”  
  
“Don’t like no other dimensions than here,” Mike replied unhelpfully. “Light’s funny and the ground don’t smell right.”  
  
“Don’t tell me you’re scared!”  
  
“Got other things to tend to. Fighting. Hunting. Trying to get things organized again after the total hooraw’s nest somebody’s made of things.”  
  
The _somebody_ was Spike, unmaking the Hellmouth and social-planning at least half of Sunnydale’s vampires into oblivion.  
  
Mike didn’t have much regard for Spike as a social planner. Which again was likely fair enough, Spike supposed, and therefore bit back a retort.  
  
A whole lot of things didn’t need saying, among the three of them. Most things just were. Most things, they just knew.  
  
They continued to sit: the actual and titular Master Vampires of Sunnydale, bracketing the Dimensional Key.  
  
“Need somebody to stand lookout,” Mike allowed presently after taking a heavy hit from the roach, “seems like. When you’re…occupied. Like tonight. Could do that sometime, if you give me notice.”  
  
“All right. Maybe.” Pitching the butt end of his fag, Spike rose, and Mike did, too. “There’s one up ahead just a bit. Was about to check on it when those damn fledges crashed in. Not taking Bit through. But she could wait. With you.”  
  
“Wouldn’t mind,” Mike said as Dawn blurted, "Yes!" as though her side (whatever that was at the moment) had scored a goal.  
  
“Since you’re here and all,” Spike added grudgingly, an accustomed dance of offhand approach and retreat that didn’t require actual asking or ordering, or actual agreement or obedience.  
  
All indirect and circuitous, to neither challenge nor lose face, either one.  
  
Things were difficult and touchy with Mike these days, it never having been fully thrashed out between them who was boss now. Safer that way. But touchy.  
  
And the same between Mike and Dawn, Spike supposed. Things were changing, had changed, and none of them knew precisely what that meant or where they stood with it, each in relation to the others.  
  
He was good with the Slayer, though; and past a certain point, that was all that signified. He figured the rest would sort itself however it had to. Wasn’t up to him, after all.  
  
Mike gave Dawn a hand to help her up but she then disengaged, getting out the damn flashlight again and switching it on. Mike traded a look with Spike but neither of them said anything. At an official seventeen, there was nothing much Dawn could be forced to do or prevented from doing.  
  
“Well, come on, then!” Fragile and imperious, Dawn started back in long tip-toe strides, from one tie to the next, toward where Spike had felt the rift, and the two vampires trailed along in the understood helplessness of males before their intractable, oblivious womenfolk.  
  
**********  
  
Blinking sleepily, Buffy stretched, yawning. And then smiled when Spike gathered her close again without waking.  
  
He was almost always here now, either through the night or at least before sunrise. He had a fresh, abraded bruise at his temple: challenge fight up at Willy’s, probably, or the result of one of the lone, manic sweeps of the downtown streets he persisted in doing though with vamp numbers so reduced, it hardly seemed worthwhile. She didn’t patrol on weekends anymore and only a few nights a week--breaking up new lairs, mostly. Keeping the fledges confused, scattered, thinned out.  
  
Frowning as she rose and reached for her robe, she wondered if, with things relatively placid, Spike was getting bored. Though that’s what they’d been trying to achieve, and Buffy was past ecstatic not to be facing one of the seemingly inevitable periodic apocalypses, a bored Spike swinging off on destructive tangents could be a problem. Spike didn’t do peace all that well.  
  
When she returned from the shower, rubbing her hair dry, Spike was up, looking out a window he’d opened a crack at the bottom because he’d lit a cigarette. As carelessly nude as he was deliberate and particular in costuming himself, he was gorgeous in the cool winter light through the special glass that protected him, though Buffy figured he could mostly handle that himself now, without a blanket, even. She still wasn’t used to seeing him in full daylight; maybe she never would be.  
  
He’d been growing toward the light for a long time, she thought.  
  
Settling at her dresser whose mirror turned him invisible behind her, Buffy commented, “You have pensive face,” as she plugged in a dryer and started running a wide-toothed comb through her hair.  
  
Spike’s hand took the dryer, and his thumb clicked off its noise. Setting the dryer aside, he removed the comb, too, and commenced drawing a brush through her hair with slow, cherishing strokes. She knew he liked doing that, and she didn’t mind a bit of being fussed over. But she hugged herself and shivered: the window was still open.  
  
Making an amused noise, Spike went and shut it, carefully stubbing out the cigarette before he returned.  
  
“Tender little hothouse posy, you are,” he teased, resuming the strokes. “California winters aren’t worth the name. Not even freezing, out there. Practically balmy. Hate to see you face an actual winter--snow, ice, an’ all that.”  
  
“Just because some of us aren’t year-round room temperature doesn’t mean it’s not cold!” Still shivering, Buffy frowned into the mirror, trying to work out if that had come out right. “I hate having to put on fifteen layers, so I look like a barrel!”  
  
“But such a stylish barrel. Trim, kicky boots that’d wilt at the least touch of a puddle--”  
  
“Oh, shut up.” She batted at him. He was always mocking her footwear. As though scuffed steel-toed boots were the height of fashion. In the heat of summer, he wore the stifling duster; in winter, seldom more than a button-down over a T-shirt, usually with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms bare. Conspicuous contrariness--that was his thing. A one-vamp fashion statement…about twenty years out of date.  
  
He had great forearms, that was true. All round and muscle-y. Severely toned, if not tanned. Very nice biceps, too. Not to mention triceps and lats, all corded and slithery under the skin. Wrists solid as cross-sections of I-beams. He could lift a truck if he felt like it. Or uproot a tree.  
  
He was stroking fingers through her hair now, making her scalp tingle, while she leaned back against his chest, rubbing her hands up and down his arms. “Mmmmm,” she commented.  
  
Bending close, he licked the mark, his mark, that bracketed her collarbone, which sent the tingles diving as he purred into her ear, “Could maybe warm you up the old-fashioned way. All pink and glowing.”  
  
“Mmmmm,” she agreed, dropping her arms to let the thin, silky robe slide away.  
  
Warmed up very nicely about half an hour later, sweating a little, even, Buffy flopped her head on Spike’s torso in luxurious, conscious ease. No job. No requirement to show herself until noon unless she wanted, even if it hadn't been Sunday. Long, entwined mornings in bed with suitable diversions. Life was good.  
  
At seventeen, Dawn was surely able to concoct her own breakfast and lunch, too, though the thought of a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich or similar Dawnish combination was fairly ooksome. “How’s the translation coming?” she asked idly.  
  
“Got a bit behind,” Spike admitted, rolling to draw up the duvet and tuck it solicitously close around her, gathering her in like a wrapped bundle. Then he changed his mind and slid underneath, too, nuzzling close. He liked warmth well enough, and certain kinds of _hot_ could send him into ecstasies. Just didn’t need it, the way she did, and sometimes was a little self-conscious and apologetic about having no warmth of his own to give her except in the one way. Or two ways, if you counted sparring and fighting….  
  
“Nagging, are you?” he inquired, licking up behind her ear. “Got to keep the tame vamp chained up to the desk, wearing the poncy glasses, trying to--”  
  
“No! Of course not. You know that, don’t you? If the Watchers’ Council fired you tomorrow, no big. We’d manage now, some way. It’s not just you, holding everything together. You know that, right?” She took his ears prisoner, forcing him to meet her eyes, searching his face to make sure he was joking, or mostly joking.  
  
Sometimes she worried about that, too. Because he wasn’t a tame, gutless nerd. He was a fighter, and an awesome one. Not quite as awesome as the Slayer, though they tested that out, various ways, every now and again. Unfortunately, there were no wages in being a Champion of the People, as Buffy had good reason to know. She was a little afraid, though, he’d doggedly chain himself to the responsibility, as he’d been doing the past months, until he either exploded in all directions…or didn’t. Lost the fire that burned in them both. Made them such excellent partners.  
  
“We should go somewhere,” she decided suddenly. “Get away. Holiday break is coming up, no school for Dawn, and we could miss a few patrols, no big. Someplace warm--Mexico, maybe. I know you’ve been there, you’ve been everywhere--” She waved her arms around to indicate the utterness of the _everywhere_. To hear him tell it, at least.  
  
“Working on that, pet,” Spike said, hitching his head away from her grasp with a very small smile, as though he knew something she didn’t.  
  
“What?” she demanded.  
  
“Nothing, yet.”  
  
“What?” She got her fingers into his ribs and started tickling, and he tried to stop her by wrapping her tighter in the duvet, and they rolled off the bed (it really was too narrow) and wrestled, and that turned into the usual--lazy and playful this time instead of fierce and urgent. With their open, flexible schedules, they came together four or five times a day now, which Buffy considered entirely satisfactory. She wanted as much of that as she could get, things always on the simmer between them, and Spike seemed to feel the same if frequency was anything to go by. At least he never disappointed her and had made no complaints. Seemed to need it as much as she did, after their long while apart and then his period of highly dubious enthrallment by that bastard, Ethan Rayne…  
  
Which reminded her. Rolling over comfortably, her hip pillowed by the folds of duvet, Buffy remarked, “Giles called last night, after you left.”  
  
“What’s Rupert want?” Spike responded in a blurred voice, barely blinking, almost asleep. He was a vampire, after all, and most comfortable with nocturnal habits. He’d probably sleep the day away, then be all bouncy and Tigger and ready to go at sunset. When she was winding down. Still enough overlap, though, to make it good.  
  
“You’ll laugh. It was you he wanted to talk to, actually. He wants to know where you disposed of Rayne. With all the trouble we had to go to, to get rid of that bastard, now Giles wants him back. Isn’t that hilarious?”  
  
Spike cast an arm up across his eyes. “An’ what did you say, pet?”  
  
“Basically, that he could get stuffed,” Buffy replied, giggling guiltily. “Although I didn’t put it _quite_ that way…. Where _did_ you toss him, Spike?”  
  
Buffy had been too busy fighting, and then ducking random portals flaring open and clapping shut, to notice details of Rayne’s enforced exit about a month ago, ending his attempt to reopen the Hellmouth. One second the chaos mage had been there, waving and shouting, and Spike up on the factory beam, blazing and exultant in the final seconds before he began to burn. And the next second, Rayne just wasn’t there anymore and Spike was falling like some character out of mythology, helplessly blazing.  
  
The memory made her shudder.  
  
When Spike didn’t respond, Buffy prompted worriedly, “He didn’t get away, did he? Teleport or something? Like before? Spike?”  
  
Arm still shielding his face, Spike exhaled--a soft, buzzing noise. Snoring.  
  
Buffy’s stomach replied with a reproachful rumble. Time to get decent and finish off that cup of yogurt. Maybe even some super-nonfat crackers.  
  
Bent on tiptoe, pulling on sweats against the chill she again felt, Buffy reflected that Spike swore up and down he didn’t snore. But he did. She should get Willow in as a witness, since Dawn already knew and Spike pooh-poohed her, too. He’d have a harder time refuting Willow, an unbiased witness. But she should cover him up first. And Willow would probably turn beet-red anyway and dive back into the hall with her eyes squinched shut, like she’d never seen Oz naked though not lately, of course, and it would become a big _thing_ and likely not worth the trouble, just to get Spike to admit that he snored.  
  
And the business about Rayne, she could ask him about that later, in case Giles called back, which she had a feeling he would. Not as if it was anything urgent, after all. The important part was that the wily old mage was gone, and good riddance, and so say all of us, Buffy thought rancorously, wrestling into the sweat top with the tasteful green embroidery.  
  
At least, with the sunlight blazing in, the kitchen would probably be _warm!_  
  
***********  
  
Late that afternoon, Spike was sitting in the den, staring at the computer screen, contemplating adjacent dimensions and making a list of what they’d need, when Dawn leaned in from the hall to report, “Giles on the phone.”  
  
Sliding off the glasses, Spike stuck an earpiece thoughtfully in his mouth without looking around. He’d heard the phone ringing, on the weapons chest in the front room. Ignored it. He figured now that he knew what that was about and didn’t want any part in it whatever.  
  
“You talk to him, Bit.”  
  
“He’s asking for you,” Dawn corrected.  
  
“Don’t care who he’s asking for. You talk to him. Say I’m busy. Doing his fucking translation, aren’t I? No time for idle chit-chat. You tell him.”  
  
Hardly idle chit-chat, transatlantic calls. But Spike didn’t care. Might owe the Watcher for bailing him out of that business with Rayne but that was done, Giles toddled off home to muck about rebuilding the goddamned Council of Wankers, and that was nothing to do with Spike, not anymore. No joy to be had there.  
  
“Spike?” Dawn was back, leaning in the doorway. “He still wants to talk to you.” When no action was forthcoming, Dawn added bluntly, “He knows you’re here.”  
  
Not having come up with a way of stonewalling the Watcher without backlash that would involve Buffy, Spike said finally, “Yeah. All right,” slapped down the glasses and pushed away from the table.  
  
Bending to the weapons chest, Spike scooped up the receiver. “Yeah.”  
  
“Hello, Spike,” came the Watcher’s voice, dry and plummy…and cautious, a bit. “How are you? Enjoying leisure at last?”  
  
“What d’you want?”  
  
“Well, at least your phone manners are intact. Such as they are. I’m fine, incidentally. If a bit vexed at the impossibility of moving even the tatters of this organization at anything beyond a glacial pace…. It’s Ethan, Spike: what did you do with him?”  
  
“Been bothering you, has he?”  
  
A crackling intercontinental silence. Then: “Yes, actually. I suppose one could say that. I find the notion of his being relegated to some abominable hell dimension troubling. And I discover I could actually use him here. His offer to assist with the restructuring of the council was not entirely without merit, I realize, away from the heat of the moment. So? To what exile did you send him?”  
  
“Didn’t miss him before, when the Initiative had him. Forgot him altogether, seems like. Why miss him now?”  
  
“Spike, answer the bloody question,” Giles responded, just as icily.  
  
Spike scratched an eyebrow, thinking. Seemed some of Rayne’s bitterness about what he considered Giles’ betrayal and abandonment had set hooks, could still tug at him with unwanted sympathy. Not that he had any affection, or anything like affection, for the bugger. Just thinking about Rayne made him uneasy.  
  
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” he retorted eventually.  
  
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”  
  
“Lady chose, not me. Whatever portal she opened around him, I just booted him through, didn’t I, and got on with the rest. A bit busy at the time, Rupert--doing my Icarus impression an’ all.”  
  
“Yes, quite,” Giles responded in a gentler tone. “So you truly don’t know?”  
  
“Not clue one, here. ‘S why I put you onto Dawn, though she’s got no more clue than I do. Could maybe ask Lady Gates for you, since it’s her mum, more or less. Dunno if she’s allowed. Got nothing to do with me, regardless. I got no special entrée there. Just the Lady’s fucking ‘instrument,’ by her lights. Goddam Powers. Tips me a hint the size of Canada whenever she wants something busted up, slaughtered, destroyed. Pays me no mind, otherwise. Queen Victoria. S’pose she had a headsman--had to, didn’t she? Comes with the job. Bet she didn’t invite him to tea.”  
  
“I…see.”  
  
“So you talk to Bit some more, if you want. I’m done.” Dropping the receiver on the chest, Spike crossed back to the den, commenting to Dawn in passing, “Talk to him, if you want. It’s on his dime.”  
  
After awhile Dawn returned from the front room and settled on the carpet beside Spike’s chair, folding an arm on his thigh and leaning her head on top. Familiar and comfortable. Nobody could get after him as harsh as Dawn could; and nobody he felt easier with.  
  
As she started to speak, Spike said abruptly, “Don’t want to know. Nothing about it. Nothing to do with me. You do whatever you please about it, Bit. Between you and the Lady, innit? Something, or nothing. Don’t care, don’t want to know. Not gonna run messages between ‘em, come to their whistle, run their errands, like that Oz. Not gonna get mixed up in their fucking business again.”  
  
She waited a minute to be sure he was done. “Then I guess you don’t want to know what I said.”  
  
“No interest whatever. No good coming from that direction. Not for us.” Spike ran spread, vexed fingers through his hair. Then, frowning/squinting at the screen, he collected the glasses with one hand and let the other drop to the crown of her shining dark head, slowly petting there.  
  
“You’re scared,” Dawn observed after a peaceful while.  
  
“Yeah. So?”  
  
“So what are you scared of?”  
  
“That they’ll set some damn thing going and try to tangle us up in it. Me. Your sis, she doesn’t need that. Just got it all pretty well settled. Has her class, enough dosh to get by on anyway if I keep the translation up. Her place. Her time. Her choices. You. Her chums. Don’t want that interfered with. Don’t want that…complicated with trash has nothing to do with us unless we’re stupid enough to let ourselves get sucked in. Ain’t been stupid, have you, Bit? More than usual, anyways?”  
  
She thumped a fist on his knee. He tugged her hair.  
  
She asked quietly, “And is that enough for you?”  
  
“Well, has to be, doesn’t it?” Spike responded curtly. “’Cause that’s all there is, or will be. Can slow myself down to everyday. Did, with the chip, didn’t I? Know I was lucky to have blood provided, even that terrible pig swill. A safe place to lair up, even if more often than not I was tied or chained down to it. Not being staked another day.” He shrugged. “Just living. Unliving. Whatever.” He tilted a hand. “Do what you can. The time passes.”  
  
That was all inchoate in his mind. But it was all right, with Bit, not to have it all parceled out tight and logical. All right to think out loud, even if it didn’t make much sense. She didn’t judge him, though she’d bully and nag him quick enough, which was only to be expected. She was outside his choices, not waiting or depending on him for anything. One of the things he loved her for.  
  
Shared context made some things easier with Giles. Could do shorthand--like that about Queen Victoria--and no need for labored explanations. With Bit, though, it was themselves they had in common. After all, she was anchored to this dimension with a piece of his soul: only natural that they mostly understood each other. So a lot of things didn’t need to be said at all.  
  
As he continued working on the list, she got up and leaned on back of his chair, arms folded across his shoulders, reading, because she pointed at the screen, commenting, “Bathing suits.”  
  
“You think?”  
  
“Trust me: bathing suits. And sunscreen. You _would_ forget sunscreen.”  
  
“Well, don’t need it, do I?”  
  
“How do you know?” she countered, eyes bright and wide. “It could be just like, well, sun. Or it could be like anything. Don’t theorize in advance of your data. And so far, we have no data. Just a set of specifications that we’re still adding to.”  
  
“Right you are. Thanks, Ms. Holmes.” Spike dutifully added the items to his list.  
  
“You’re welcome, Watson. Somebody has to be the brains of this operation…. Hey: how about the mall? Climate-controlled and everything. Stores close early, but we could do supper there, wander around. You know. Bet Buffy would like that!”  
  
“Bet she would, at that. You ask her, Princess.”  
  
“No, you should--”  
  
“Busy here, aren’t I? List gets longer, all this trash, gonna need the van to carry it all. You ask her.” Deftly, Spike tucked the list down at the bottom of the screen, disclosing the current translation waiting behind. “Got to get this piece done or we won’t get paid for it by the time the mortgage’s due.” Frowning through the glasses, that he didn’t much mind Dawn seeing him in, he was sure he presented the very picture of intent, scholarly absorption. Enough, anyway, that she flounced off down the hall toward the basement, where Buffy was doing laundry or something or other.  
  
Himself, he didn’t want to offer Buffy any pressure, anything she might feel obliged to accept, reluctant to refuse. Wanted to leave her free in all her ways and her choices. She’d earned that. Wanted to hang back, wait for her cue and her lead and then follow it.  
  
Importunate begging, that was what little sisters were for, wasn’t it?  
  
And as to the surprise he was working on so hard, preparing so carefully, that was different because he already knew she wanted that, and he was gonna give it to her: _warm._  
  
He smiled at the screen.  
  
**********  
  
Dawn was the first one out of the SUV after Spike backed it carefully (for Spike) down the length of the alley, leaving just enough space to get the back hatch open. Mike uncovered and started handing things out to her. About twenty bags, foam chests, and miscellaneous stuffed into oddly bulging garbage bags for convenience in handling. Not all that much, considering they’d ferried most of the stuff up last night and she’d managed to guilt Mike into going across to help her and Spike set up. Nervous as a cat with vacuuming in progress, Mike had eventually pronounced the totality “nice.” So he couldn’t very well back out now, right?  
  
That it was a secret meant there was no obligation to invite Willow, Xander, or (heaven forfend!) Anya. And Dawn had no intention of being lone man out while Spike and Buffy had smoochies and probably more than smoochies. Might get some smoochies of her own in, if Mike would cooperate, which he generally did if it was her asking, Dawn thought smugly, setting one of the blood coolers by the wall and swinging back to receive the other. In front of the SUV, as the light faded, Spike could discard the blanket and continue deflecting Buffy from investigating what was being unloaded from the back, which was a good thing to keep him occupied since he’d been maniacally useless all day except for driving, of course.  
  
Buffy was stomping back and forth across the alley in tight dark green fleece pants, a fuzzy beret like a lime halo, and a jade (celadon?) down jacket, hugging herself against the chill. Dressed for the opposite season, Dawn was shivering herself, what with her bare legs and flip-flops showing her freshly-painted toenails (another occupation to keep Spike from coming totally unglued).  
  
Under her knee-length hoodie Dawn was wearing the most skimpy, thong-y bikini (yellow with deep pink hibiscus there was barely enough material to show, with their elongated and highly symbolic pistils, but the matching sheer, floaty overshirt took care of any display problem) she’d been able to wheedle Spike into agreeing to on their swimsuit-buying detour at the mall. They’d had to go: naturally, Spike didn’t own a swimsuit. And he’d gone totally overboard on what he’d bought for Buffy. At least it was 99% spandex, so it should fit despite Spike’s wildly fanciful notions of Buffy’s proportions.  
  
Strange: you'd think he'd know.  
  
While he’d still been dazed with crimson spandex, Dawn had managed to smuggle in something suitable for Mike, just on hopeful spec, and Spike had signed for everything without seeming to notice, so that stratagem had worked out perfectly.  
  
When everything was piled and handy, it was time: nearly sundown on the first day of vacation. They could have come anytime, really, except for vampires’ problems with daylight since although the house had been all fitted up with necro-tempered glass, the SUV still hadn’t and Dawn didn’t want to contend with any more reasons for Mike to opt out than he already had. And there was also the contrast factor.  
  
“OK, Spike,” Dawn called. “We’re ready!”  
  
Sliding between the SUV and the side of the alley, Spike started collecting baggage. Dawn firmly disentangled him from loops and handles and herded him to the alley’s back wall, reminding him, “We’ll collect it later.”  
  
“But somebody could--”  
  
“It’s a blind alley, Spike. Blocked by a locked, parked vehicle only slightly smaller than a bus. Or it will be: Buffy, you can lock up now.”  
  
“Spike has the keys and the thingie,” Buffy pointed out as Spike dragged her by both wrists into the remaining clear space between the rear of the vehicle and the wall, as wild-eyed and frantic as though he thought she was gonna attempt an escape.  
  
It seemed Spike had tossed the keys on the front seat when he’d rid himself of the blanket. As Spike edged off to retrieve them, Mike swung out of the hatch and shut it, offering, “I could take the van back to your place. Come back and fetch you, any time you say.”  
  
“Oh, no you don’t!” Dawn grabbed Mike’s wrist and though he could have swatted her like a bug, that was shackle enough to hold him. “Who’s gonna lay the bonfire right, so it doesn’t catch the cabana?” Leaning close, she imparted the dire whisper, “Who’s gonna dig the latrine?”  
  
“Spike, he knows,” Mike began feebly, falling silent as Spike backed into view, hitting the squeaker that made the SUV chirp a report of being locked, except he hit it again and then had to test the nearest door to determine if two chirps meant it was unlocked again or only locked twice until Dawn took the squeaker away from him and steered him back in front of the baggage.  
  
“Spike, focus, for heaven’s sake! Lock onto the rift: can you feel it?”  
  
Jittering around in place, he shut his eyes, breathing nervously. “It’s gone, Bit. Shut itself off and--”  
  
“It’s done nothing of the kind: these rifts have been in place for centuries. You _know_ that! Deep breath,” she commanded, not sure if he was capable of working himself into hyperventilation, considering he didn’t need the air at all, but not wanting to find out. “Hold. Three Mississippi, two Mississippi, one Mississippi. Release. Now try again. Focus, dammit!”  
  
Slowly he rotated, turning side-on to the wall, left shoulder a little hunched and head tilted, frowning with his eyes tight shut. He lifted a hand for her to take, but Dawn snatched Buffy’s hand instead and set it in Spike’s clasp, taking Buffy’s free hand and determinedly linking to Mike, behind. It didn’t matter where she was in the linkage. Might not even matter that they all be linked, since they weren’t being inserted individually: once the way was open, it was open until released. Spike wouldn’t let it close until they had all the baggage and supplies transferred.  
  
Dawn couldn’t see or feel anything different. Couldn’t sense the rift on her own. But somewhere inside her she felt the slight tug on what she’d learned was the thin skein of soul-stuff that was her connection to Spike: Spike aligned and locked tight to the rift, wanting _in_. And in some way completely beyond words, she knew how to give him what he wanted. Consent, it was. Permission. Even benediction of a sort. Power, certainly--fine-tuned as a laser beam. Just the right pressure in just the right place. It didn’t come from her but through her, somehow. Not hers, but hers to give and grant.  
  
And his to use.  
  
It required both of them.  
  
The wall was still solidly there, but it had ceased to matter. Hand in hand in hand in hand, they went _across_.  
  
Buffy was gonna be _sooo_ flabbergasted!  
  
**********  
  
Buffy hated surprises. Hated and loathed them with a fierce passion. Surprises made you look dumb, everybody waiting on your reaction. Not knowing what was expected, what to do.  
  
When she was tugged forward when there shouldn’t have been any forward, when the cold, constricted twilight suddenly became distance, and dim red sunlight glinting off slowly undulating waves, and her boots were sinking into the warm sand of a pristine beach stretching off as far as she could see to either side, she knew exactly where to look, what to do.  
  
She flung herself at Spike, and tried to explore his tonsils with her tongue, and was as thoroughly all over him as she knew how to be and remain more or less vertical, Spike staggering a bit because Buffy’s legs were wrapped around his waist. When she had to leave off a second to breathe, she used the breath to tell him, “It’s wonderful, it’s--”  
  
“--hoped you might like it, nobody around to trouble you, stays just like this--”  
  
“--perfect, however did you find it? You--”  
  
Then they forgot about talking again until Dawn interrupted with rude gakking noises, saying, “Spike. Yoo hoo, Spike! You can let it shut, now, we have everything inside. Or here. Or however you’re supposed to say it. Spike!”  
  
While Spike stepped back to do whatever he did, Buffy flung her fluffy beret in one direction, her jacket in another, and plunked her rear on the sand to haul off her boots.  
  
Warm! Gloriously, stultifyingly warm. Hot, even! A tang of salt in the air but that air unstirring, not so much as a breeze.  
  
As Buffy started to haul up the hem of her sweat top, Spike’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. She looked up at him inquiringly, then followed his gesture, endearingly abrupt and almost shy, to a purple-and-white striped cabana like a miniature circus tent. Or maybe the stripes were blue: the red light made everybody, even Spike, look like bruised plums.  
  
Although Mike looked uneasy, the illumination didn’t seem to be doing the vamps any harm, Spike would have checked on that, of course, so nothing to worry about on that front and she could forget about it. Anyway, the cabana was perfect and it was plain she got first crack at it. She ran for it, bare feet pounding in the sand.  
  
Inside were an enormous pile of towels on one of several canvas chairs, a jerry-rigged shower (a big plastic container with a hose) suspended where two corner poles met, and on a hanger, a wisp of gorgeous crimson nearly nothing that hardly qualified as clothing. Sweet but unnecessary: she would have obliviously stripped, out there on the sand. Nothing either Spike nor Dawn hadn’t seen before, and she was as indifferent to Mike’s gaze as to that of a fish, or a squirrel. But because it was there, she put the bikini on, wishing for a mirror as she tugged out wrinkles in awkward places until the spandex clung smooth as a second skin. Maybe a good soaking would help.  
  
Bursting out of the cabana, she charged straight at the water. Having removed only his boots, Spike was sitting in the sand having a cigarette. Dawn and Mike were conversing between two big shoulder-high piles of wood. Buffy stumbled and nearly fell when she saw the almost transparent float Dawn’s removal of her hoodie left revealed. Catching her balance with an overhead wave, Buffy turned it into a summoning gesture, calling to Spike, “Come on! Last one in’s a rotten egg!”  
  
He bounced to his feet and was running, long floating strides in the red twilight, and hit the water in an arrowing dive just an instant before she did, so she knew she didn’t need to worry about rocks or sucking undertow or any hazards like that.  
  
The water was blood warm--more like a hot tub than an ocean. She stroked out, through and over the placid, undulant waves, to proper swimming depth. That was a surprisingly long way out: the beach must shelve very gradually.  
  
Turning in place and buoyant as a volleyball, throwing her hair back, she started looking around for Spike, both above and below the water. The dim light didn’t penetrate: she couldn’t see anything. And her eyes stung, afterward.  
  
She was sure he was going to grab her leg or porpoise up underneath her. Instead, what must have been a deliberate splash drew her attention farther out. Spike was swimming there. As she watched, he jackknifed, diving. Bare shoulders, bare back, bare…. Oh.  
  
About a minute later, he surfaced near her, balanced upright in the water like a seal. “You’re naked,” Buffy announced blankly, pushing water away from her.  
  
“Don’t have to work so hard, love. Water will pretty much keep you up. More salt in it than you’re used to. You’ll want to sluice off, after. Brought fresh water for that. It’s--”  
  
“I saw it. If I swallow some, is that gonna be a problem?” Buffy looked around her, suddenly registering the alien landscape absent of trees or grass, just dunes rolling down to a sea placid, almost, as a lake. A different motion. A different texture. Stranger than she’d initially noticed.  
  
Like Spike, who was watching her take it in. Not visibly nervous anymore, but still watching. “As to that other, Bit said I should so I did, to shut her up about it. Doesn’t mean I got to wear it, though. Got a couple of changes in the cabana. Have you fetch me a towel when it’s time. Or just tell Bit to squinch her eyes shut, not look if she don’t want to see…. Ain’t got everything. Nothing for you to kill, of an evening, ‘cause there’s nothing alive. At least anyplace I could find, a few miles roundabout…. Nor in the water, neither,” he added, in response to her nervous downward glance. “No fish to nibble your toes, nor seaweed to tangle your legs nor jellyfish to wash up on the shore to poke at with a stick. No shells to collect. All powder, long since. Air’s a bit thinner than what you’re used to, but didn’t leave Bit in serious lack while we were moving things in, setting up, a few hours there, so it should be all right…. No evening, come to that. Always just like this. Old sun, can’t force out enough light to read by proper, much less fry a vamp. Always just there, hand’s breadth from the horizon. Doesn’t rise or set--”  
  
Buffy whispered, “Where are we?”  
  
“No clue. Not the slightest. But we can get back, and that’s all that should signify. If…if you like it, I mean. Enough to stay awhile.”  
  
She knew he was gonna dive, and he did, and she had no trouble staying with him since he wasn’t trying to get away. She latched tight to a handful of hair--enough to bring them face to face, mouth to mouth. The bikini proved to have enough slack to accommodate the needed adjustments and holding on hard, clutching close, was a decent substitute for gravity. The water kept floating them to the surface but they were far enough offshore, Buffy figured it didn’t matter.  
  
When they finally leaned back in the water, separate again except for an arm outflung by each and clasped at the wrists, not even needing to stroke, and Spike took up his self-deprecating recital of ways the place didn’t quite meet his rigorous specifications for Buffy pleasing, wasn’t totally a fantasy beach out of some movie, she dunked him, then hauled him close when he bobbed up again.  
  
Nuzzling under his chin, licking up the outside of the shell of his ear, Buffy stated fervently, “It’s perfect. 100% deep-dyed, no preservatives, no fat perfect. It’s warm!”  
  
Spike allowed himself to be reassured.  
  
Far away, onshore, a bonfire was leaping and small, distant music played. Without asking, Buffy knew the wood wasn’t local and batteries were included. Every likely need provided for. There was therefore food!  
  
After a final (for now) rocking kiss, she and Spike turned and stroked for the shore.


	2. Terminal Beach

Dawn opened and set out the container of potato salad and Buffy dished herself some onto a paper plate while Spike instructed Mike in the fine art of reheating takeout spicy wings in a barbeque basket with a handle not nearly long enough for a vamp, considering the bonfire. As an ex-mercenary, Mike probably knew twenty times what Spike did about camping out but was tactful enough not to let on, accepting the instruction and its fiery result without comment. Probably didn’t care all that much either way, Dawn judged, since he’d already had two cups of blood and likely regarded the spicy wings as dessert.  
  
That was when Buffy innocently asked for a napkin and there weren’t any.  
  
Spike blew up, acting as if her remark about napkins was a coded admission that she didn’t like the place because it was dead and unchanging and not up to her expectations, not fucking good enough for her, and Buffy protested and declared him insane since all it was, was frickin’ _napkins_ , for heaven’s sake, both of them throwing their arms and yelling.  
  
Since Mike had backed off, opting to be merely a large and disinterested feature of the landscape, it was clear that Dawn intervention was called for.  
  
Springing erect, arms tight to her sides, she screeched, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Dawnscreech having achieved the required startled silence, she rounded on Spike, declaring, “There are three convenience stores within a block of the alley. They’re open all night. I’ll go and get some napkins, all right?”  
  
Not looking at anyone, Mike put in quietly, “Not alone.”  
  
That was so self-evidently reasonable that it took discussion to sort out. The upshot, of course, was that Spike would accompany her since it took both of them to open the rift anyway.  
  
Dragging her hoodie on and scuffing into her flip-flops, Dawn said flatly, “Fine. Fine!” and stomped off along the ascending line of their tracks.  
  
Though it was plain, even from this side, where the rift had to be, Spike was forever tuning himself to it and locking on. No focus whatever. They burst through into the dark alley, frigid by contrast. Dawn pulled her shoulders in and hugged herself, walking fast--slap, slap, slap up the alley--refusing to notice whether Spike followed or not. It was all his fault anyway, with his insane-o hypersensitivity about whether Buffy would like his obviously inadequate and napkinless offering. But she had to notice because napkins cost money and she hadn’t thought to ask for any.  
  
Points deducted for that, as well as for overlooking the omission of napkins in the first place: reviewing and finalizing the list had been her responsibility. With Spike scattering in twenty panicked, hysterical directions, obviously somebody had to keep a cool eye and a clear head. Plain who that had to be.  
  
If she didn’t retrieve the situation, she could be into debit points for the whole night.  
  
So she fussed and fumed in the garish light of the Quik-Mart, waiting for Spike to charge the box of napkins and a couple packs of cigarettes on the plastic for a clerk who probably thought he’d seen everything but not a barelegged girl in pink flip-flops in the company of a barefoot, grim-looking tough wearing only jeans, whose face, chest, and hands were bloodily sticky with what was, in fact, barbeque sauce. In December.  
  
“Cookout,” Dawn explained brightly. “Forgot the napkins.”  
  
Didn’t help much to make them seem anything like normal, she could see. So she skittered quickly after Spike, who’d stopped outside to light a cigarette, indifferent to the cold.  
  
“Spike, get a grip,” she implored, dancing and freezing. “It’s not the end of the world, for God’s sake. It’s _napkins!_ ”  
  
Spike turned toward the alley, pacing slow. He seemed to be having trouble keeping the cigarette lit, stopping to relight it three times. If he could, Dawn thought, he would have run and finished the evening with a stinking drunk, savage fight up at Willy’s if he could find somebody stupid enough to take him on; but that would mean leaving her alone and Buffy and Mike stuck on the Terminal Beach and he couldn’t quite make himself do that.  
  
He was putting himself through agonies. It was totally demented.  
  
Only not from his own perspective. To him, it was real.  
  
“Look,” Dawn said, catching his arm at the head of the alley, “there are advantages to dead: no ants. No mosquitoes or sand fleas. You’re imagining Buffy sees the place like you do, like any vamp would--barren, sterile, lifeless.”  
  
“What would you know about it,” Spike retorted in a harsh, dismissive mutter.  
  
“I asked Mike, of course. Because he doesn’t like it. He’s only there because I didn’t give him an out. He was willing to admit to ‘nice,’ which translates as ‘tolerable.’ No more life than a mural. Nothing much to touch, nothing at all to fight, no smells, barely light. Everything blood-colored and still. Pretty enough on the surface but only on the surface. Ancient and dead and worn-out underneath. Like the inside of a vamp’s head, blown up to be a world.”  
  
“Thanks a lot.” Spike pitched the cigarette that wouldn’t stay lit and stood uselessly tamping a fresh one on the pack.  
  
“But what you’re not taking account of,” Dawn ran on earnestly, “is that’s not what it is to Buffy. It’s warm, and a break, and a gift, and new to her. We’re there. And that’s enough. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be enough, Spike.”  
  
He set his shoulder against the corner bricks, head bent. “She said. Said it was perfect. Wasn’t.”  
  
“It was as close as we could come in the time we had. She was happy. Until you started throwing a fucking imbecilic tantrum about napkins!”  
  
‘Wasn’t about the napkins. And your sis doesn’t want you talking like that anymore.”  
  
“It’s you I’m talking to: who else is gonna hear, Spike? Let her be happy, even if it’s not your sort of happiness. If she can enjoy it, let her. It was for her, remember? You did what you thought she’d like, what you hoped she wanted. You don’t paint my toenails because my toes are so fascinating, you do it because you love me and we’re together and it’s a connection, a pretext, and it’s fun, Spike! Silly and stupid and fun! It doesn’t have to be the answer to the Meaning of Life, it only has to be fun! And you’re ruining it! Wanting it to be everything, mean everything, when it’s only a Goddamned extradimensional picnic, Spike--!”  
  
Finally moving, Spike gathered her in, elbow crooked around her neck in a sort of loose headlock, thumb and fist under her chin. “Cold. Should get you back to the fire.”  
  
Leaning together, against each other, they sidled along the SUV to the back wall. Maybe it was a better omen that Spike located the rift as easily as lifting a hand to a doorknob.  
  
“Break out the wine,” Dawn advised as they emerged on Terminal Beach. Grabbing the plastic sack from Spike, Dawn flapped it triumphantly overhead as they put fresh footprints on what was becoming a path. “Napkins! We have actual napkins! We’ve saved the day! The world is again safe for the sticky-fingered!” Making a bee-line for the beacon fire, she rotated before it as on an upright spit. The heat was glorious. Her teeth might even stop chattering.  
  
Spike had stopped by Buffy, who was making a point of fastidiously licking her fingers, as though that took the whole of her attention.  
  
After a teetering silence, Spike remarked quietly, “Gonna stow the card and some miscellaneous, wouldn’t do to lose that. Then swim out a ways. Get clean.” Gazing out over the water, he added, “Want to come?”  
  
“In a minute,” Buffy responded coolly. “Don’t worry: I’ll find you.” After he’d turned, trudging toward the cabana, Buffy muttered, “Jerk!”  
  
Dawn approved. The only proper approach when Spike was being stubborn or obnoxious was to ignore him. Offer no encouragement at all. Even Buffy knew that.  
  
The day was rescued from minus points. Dawn figured she’d brought things about even.  
  
**********  
  
Mike accepted the gooey cracker and then a quick-following offered paper napkin, even though that was all backward: he should be attending on Dawn, not the other way around.  
  
He had minions to do to his word, as was proper, in the slowly developing lair toward the east side of town. If they didn’t do as they were told, or didn’t try hard enough to anticipate what he’d want, or tried too hard to be quicker than him and do before they’d been told, like one particularly annoying and ambitious subordinate he hadn’t quite decided to dust, Mike wasted no time putting them in their place…which was under his word, under his hand. He’d learned that from Spike and practiced it ruthlessly, as a Master Vampire should.  
  
He knew precisely where he stood in the complex and ever-shifting hierarchies of vampire societies.  
  
But with Dawn, that was all upside down. She’d commanded him here, commanded him to sit and stay, then _waited_ on him. It was her pleasure to do so, even though he knew perfectly well that she’d wanted him here so she wouldn’t be relegated to least, in the company of just Buffy and Spike. So she wouldn’t have to do all the scut work and the heavy lifting while they went off and fought or fucked or whatever they happened to be doing at the moment. And then she turned around and with happy solemnity concocted s’mores one by one and passed them to him, even though he’d come, and stayed, to her word.  
  
It made no sense.  
  
The s’mores were good, but sticky. He scrubbed his fingers in the sand, then dusted off with the napkin and drank the rest of the jug rosé he’d poured into the plastic cup he’d had some blood in before, for courtesy. He tried never to be in Dawn’s company unless he was fed up, needing nothing from her in that way. His demon mostly minded him now, but he’d made some bad mistakes before, misjudgments, and didn’t want to make any of the predictable ones. Always found some new one to make, seemed like.  
  
“I don’t like that smile,” Dawn announced, so Mike bent his head further and put the smile away, inside, like folding away trueface. “What’s that smile about?”  
  
“Thinking how I want to do right by you, and don’t know how. Knowing I’ll mess up some way, wondering what it’ll be this time.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” she responded, with a small smile of her own. “Don’t rush off and do something insane, like get a soul. You do fine, considering you’re only six. You’re not here on a trial basis, Mike. You’re Spike’s declared get, and you get a pass from Buffy, and that’s pretty rare all by itself.”  
  
Mike stopped pouring more wine to point with the cup-holding hand. “See, that’s part of it, right there. Slayer, she’s like his sire--he told me so, and he hops as best he can when she calls ‘frog.’ So that’s plain. And his claiming me as his get, even though it ain’t so, that’s still plain, too. We both know where we stand, or mostly.”  
  
“And where’s that?” Dawn asked, settling down in the sand to nibble at the edges of a s’more she’d finally made just for herself.  
  
“One day, I’m gonna beat him. Then things will change. Don’t know exactly how, but I know they will. He knows it, too. Stays wide of me.” Mike finished pouring the wine, then capped the jug and set it back in the plastic tub about half filled with melting ice. “But that’s strange, too. Couple times, in that business with that Rayne, I thought there was nothing for it, to keep you safe, but to do for Spike. Take him out of the equation and it would fall apart: mage, maiden, and…whatever Spike’s made of himself, don’t know exactly what that is, standing in the sun, opening portals, rifts…. Seems like he’s part mage now but he says no, it’s just the reading, the translation….” Dawn’s eyes were dark and wide and she was breathing a little fast, upset by what he was saying, and Mike guessed he knew why. “Yeah, know you’d be real put out at me if I done that, and there were always complications, so I didn’t. But the thing is, Dawn, I was wrong. He wasn’t what I thought him, he brought it all down his ownself, like I was sure he couldn’t. Kept you from being hurt bad, which I couldn’t see any way to do or I’d have done it. And I don’t know how I could be so wrong about a thing like that, that I think I understand. So how am I to know how to do, how to be, with all that I don’t understand?”  
  
Thing about Dawn, she took his puzzlement as seriously as he felt it. Didn’t wind it around with attitude or try to twist it into something different from what he was feeling or try to convince him he didn’t feel what he did. He could say anything to her straight-out and know she’d answer the same. Plain spoken, almost, as a vamp. Except she wasn’t. She was a Key. And who the hell knew what that meant?  
  
Something of that inner thump of discouragement must have showed, because she asked, “And what was that about?”  
  
Mike shrugged. “Thinking how it’s easy to talk to you. And yet it’s not. Because I don’t know what you are. Or what you want.”  
  
“Most of the time, I don’t, either,” Dawn responded with a wry smile. “Playing it by ear, here. Just like you are. Making myself up as I go by what I choose, what I do. Like Spike does. By who I…care for. Who matters to me. ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’”  
  
Mike knew by the cadence, and her tone, that they were borrowed words: “That’s poetry.”  
  
Dawn cleaned off the last of the s’more from her fingers the same way Mike had: first the sand, then the napkin. It pleased him, that he’d given her something, taught her something, no fuss about it, just there. “Spike has this big overdue library book in the basement. I’m trying to think my way into it, the pieces that connect for me. Try to take in the pieces that don’t, that are out of my reach but I know are there because Spike, he sees them. Explains them to me sometimes, when I ask. When he has time….” She was a little sad, wistful, and Mike was indignant on her behalf.  
  
“He should spend more time with you, now he’s dumped those dumb notions about organizing vamps, and people too, a different way.” Then he stopped, thought. “But that’s wrong. It all came out how he saw it.”  
  
“Mostly. Not exactly, but mostly. Fuzzy logic. Dreams. Knowing how people move and moving himself to be in the right place at the right time. An inexact science, divination.”  
  
“That’s like dowsing. Forked stick.” Mike made the picture with his hands, thumbs together, fingers spread.  
  
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t understand it either. Neither does Spike. He just does it. I don’t know what he is anymore, either. But I know he’s no good whatever at standing still. And that’s what he’s trying to do now.”  
  
“Don’t want to talk about Spike anymore," Mike mentioned sulkily. "Just used that for an example, how I know now I don’t see things clear, or all there is, so I don’t know how to do.”  
  
“You haven’t found the right distance yet. And the pieces keep moving.”  
  
He’d said that. Or maybe she had--about how people related to each other. They’d both remembered it, anyway, which was a touch of connection he felt. Turned him moody, though.  
  
“Don’t know what you want from me, Dawn. Don’t know what the right distance would be, or how to find it.” He looked around the sterile beach, over the sterile ocean, full into the dying sun or whatever it was, moon maybe, he didn’t know.  
  
He hated alien dimensions. Made him feel lost, not knowing where he stood in relation to the most fundamental things. Light. Dark. Life. Death.  
  
The meaningless landscape in which Dawn blazed with light for him--brighter than the bonfire, far brighter than the sun, abundant with life and heat and profound significance. With her here because she wanted him here. It meant so much. And yet he didn’t understand it. And wasn't sure how long he could endure it. Until he couldn't, he supposed. Maybe that would be his next dreadful mistake.  
  
She had her head bowed, her face curtained in her long, smooth hair, hands clasped on her knees. “I don’t know either. But I know it’s important to figure it out. I’m trying, Mike--really I am.” Then she looked up at him, still and intent. “You’re gonna be older than six. But what if I stay seventeen forever? How do hills find the right distance? Or trees, after centuries?” She looked really worked up about it.  
  
 _Landslides_ , he thought. _Tectonic plates. Vast uprisings, like in the Pacific._  
  
He said, “They move,” and leaned, gathered her in, and she consented to be gathered, so slight a creature to mean so much, and he kissed her carefully, her human face and his, and they were at troubled peace together.  
  
Later, he thought, he’d give Spike a try in the ocean. Never had fought him in water. It might be different there.  
  
**********  
  
Spike was idly taking up the fine sand that had been mountains, birds maybe, towers, brothels, bars…or maybe not. Maybe there never had been any life here…. He let it sift through the hourglass of his fist. Got some more, did it again.  
  
“It’s like a different way of seeing,” he said, because she’d asked.  
  
“Like what?” Buffy prompted, squirming in a really distracting way, apparently trying to scoop the perfect Buffy-hips-shaped depression to lie back in.  
  
Up the beach, Dawn and Mike were tossing a Frisbee, racing back and forth, the pair of them about nine-tenths naked. Well, Bit had started out that way, but because Buffy had nagged Spike into tucking his naughty bits inside the black rubber band she claimed was a swimsuit, after their shower, of course then Mike had to do it too, emerging from the cabana in a similar suit except blue, strutting like a gladiator: showing off how he’d have made at least a couple of Spike, broad and deep. _In some respects, anyway,_ Spike thought complacently, patting his belly and regions south. _Don’t recall any complaints._  
  
Hadn’t tried to kick sand in Spike’s face, like that old body-building ad, ninety-pound weakling. That would likely be later.  
  
The sedate elder generation were relaxing, toe to toe, with iced wine in the mostly hypothetical shade of a beach umbrella Spike had liberated from the Sunnydale dump. Never knew when a thing like that might come in handy.  
  
Being under at least nominal shelter muted his demon’s gibbering terror of the sunlight, a constant undercurrent. Likely Mike, he was plagued with it too but doing a fairly good job of holding off blind panic, not letting on. At least Dawn looked happy, racing and shrieking, so that was all right. What Mike was there for, after all. Keep Bit occupied and entertained, freeing Spike for Buffy-shagging that’d been brilliant, so far, and more presently to look forward to. After a nap, maybe.  
  
The unmoving sun played hob with Spike’s sense of time, but he guessed it was about midnight. Whether they’d go back before Sunnydale sunrise or make another day of it here was still under lazy consideration.  
  
“Is it like a mirror with a crack in it?” Buffy continued, stretching out, testing the fit between her butt and the ground. “Or like--”  
  
Spike shook his head. “Nothing that straightforward, pet. Doesn’t go into words all that well, no more than music does.” Since she was still looking at him, all mussed lovely and sleepy-looking, he kept trying to answer. “It’s a mismatch--doesn’t quite fit. Two edges--two, anyway. And the tension of the mismatch vibrates where the edges touch.” Illustrating, he put the side of one hand against the palm of the other, pressing as hard as he could until the muscle tension started a visible shaking. Letting the tension go, leaning to collect the cup of wine, he continued, “And some way, I can feel it. Know it’s there. They’re everywhere. Some, no bigger than a pinhead. Wouldn’t know how to pass through those, haven’t tried. Others, five, ten stories tall--”  
  
“--Like where the Sh’narth come through,” Buffy commented, naming the huge, plodding demons they’d had practically a migration of, in the summer months.  
  
“Yeah. Have to be, innit? Size those things are….” He drank some wine, let the cup rest on his chest like a cool thumb wet from the condensation. “Places, I guess, where the dimensions snag on each other, hang up a bit, and thin where the snags catch together. Not entirely the one thing nor the other. Never much noticed or thought about ‘em before. No reason.”  
  
“Magic?”  
  
“Natural. No stink of magic whatever. Portals, now--that’s another matter, and you’d have to ask Red about that. Portals, they’re all sorcerous, far as I’ve been able to tell. Since that business with Rayne, I been reading up on 'em online--Watchers' archives. Found a 15th century source by a daft bugger who made a study of ‘em, twenty dozen spells to create and manipulate ‘em, there and gone like a sneeze. Chap could get himself clipped neat, halfway through, if he wasn’t spry enough in departing. All the charm of strolling into a bear trap. Rifts, though, they’re more stable and predictable…‘cause they’re part of the Natural order, I expect.”  
  
“Are there more like this? In Sunnydale, I mean?”  
  
“Galore. Hellmouth, that’s like a pry-bar punched clear through a ream of paper. Lots of tears and distortions as reality flexes, like the Lady says it does, around that pin. Layers don’t smooth just because you pull the pry-bar out, unmake it.”  
  
Buffy had her speculating face on, and Spike paid a bit more attention. He nudged her foot with his.  
  
“Oh, I was just thinking,” she responded, collecting her own cup. “Big traveler, me: all the way from Los Angeles to Sunnydale. Globe-trotter. Well, that’s not gonna happen, all right. Things are quieter, but I still have responsibilities and this is still home. I mean…not _this_ this,” Buffy corrected herself incoherently, jerking a hand at beach, ocean, sky. “The _other_ this--Revello Drive. Well, you know what I meant. But I was thinking…day trips? See new places? Really, really new places! One small step, and boldly go, and still back for breakfast. Sort of like traveling, but without the actual traveling, you know?”  
  
Her face shone with enthusiasm (and half a cup of wine), and Spike felt most of the residual tension from the Napkin Incident melt into righteous smugness.  
  
“Might,” he said, casually, just as though he didn’t feel as if he’d successfully palmed an ace and could bet the limit, knowing the hand was his. As if he hadn’t been a frantic week assembling bait, hoping she'd take it, swallow it down. “Might do. If you like.”  
  
He lit a cigarette, leaned back, and blew smoke at the brick-colored sky.  
  
He was contemplating a bright future adventuring with Buffy, successfully liberated from her Puritan workaholism and actually needing him for something, when water descended on him--wet, hard, sudden.  
  
Buffy yelped and jumped, caught by collateral splash. As Dawn stood by, giggling, Mike pitched the bucket and ran straight into the sea.  
  
Spike stood a moment, wiping his stinging eyes clear, then slicking his hair back--resigned as much as irate.  
  
Nothing else for it: pup demanded a lesson. Give him one, then.  
  
Maybe it’d be enough to distract them both from that bloody unnatural sun.  
  
**********  
  
The ice melted. Next, the firewood was exhausted, and the bonfire burned down to coals and at last to ashes. The fresh water for cleaning off the itchy, crusty salt was all gone. So no more swimming. They ordered takeout Chinese for lunch, mystifying the boy delivering it, per directions, to a shadowed, blind alley. Then the blood ran out, and Dawn really thought that would be the end of the party. Instead, Mike requested escort through the rift and pickup in a couple of hours. In the alley, Dawn quietly asked Spike if he wanted to go, too, insisting she didn’t mind, and it was dark enough now not to bother him, but he only said, “No, I’m fine,” although Dawn hadn’t seen him feed in two days, and no fresh sign he’d been snacking on Buffy--more an occasional sex thing, she gathered, than a feeding thing, though they never talked about that.  
  
So she shrugged and they went back to their beachside gin rummy game until Spike thought it should be time. A few minutes after they crossed to the alley, Mike blazed up on his bike with Sue at pillion. Stepping down from the bike and setting the kickstand, Mike remarked, “Thought somebody should keep an eye on things here.”  
  
“Hi, Dawn,” Sue called, with a waggling wave. In game-face, naturally: she was still a fledge, and Dawn wasn’t altogether happy at the way Sue lifted on her toes to bid Mike a _very_ warm goodbye.  
  
But she supposed it was OK because Mike looked faintly irritated and pushed Sue away, following them through the narrow place at the side of the SUV. Dawn couldn’t help noticing that he smelled of his funny cigarettes.  
  
She and Spike opened the rift as easy as pushing a door ajar. She thought they were getting really good at it. Mike lagged a step, then set his shoulders and barged through into the sudden, enveloping warmth.  
  
Braced against the open sunlight, Dawn thought. She knew it bothered them both, though neither had said a word about it.  
  
Guessing her thought, Mike commented, “I’ll be good for awhile, now,” and ahead, Spike choked back a laugh without turning. Mike gave her a glance she couldn’t interpret. Abruptly turned sullen and impassive, Mike took longer strides she had to hustle to keep up with.  
  
His water games seemed to have ended in a draw: he and Spike had returned separately, banged up and lame, neither gloating. Apparently the buoyant quality of the water threw them off, kept either from getting a good hold, landing a solid hit. At least, that was what Mike had blamed it on. Spike hadn’t said anything, unless it was to Buffy.  
  
Since the Napkin Incident they’d gone all couple-y, seldom out of reach or touch with one another. When they were like that Dawn tried to avoid eavesdropping: what wasn’t silence was often embarrassing. Like the Sue/Mike smoochies she was trying not to think about.  
  
Trotting down the beach, Dawn chirped, “At least you could get out. This is beginning to remind me of the Endless Birthday, when nobody could leave.”  
  
“Came back, didn’t I?” Mike responded curtly, as though she’d questioned it, doubted him.  
  
We were _not_ in a good mood this evening.  
  
Arriving first at the umbrella, Spike tossed a small something to Buffy with the comment, “Here you go, pet.”  
  
Dawn had seen him opening the SUV to collect something but hadn’t noticed what it was.  
  
Buffy’s cellphone, Dawn realized as Buffy began pushing buttons to review the missed calls and accumulated text messages.  
  
Buffy gasped a dismayed, “Oh,” then handed the phone up to Spike, who held it at nearly arm’s length, squinting to make out the characters on the tiny display.  
  
He went still, head cocked consideringly.  
  
“What is it?” Dawn asked, reaching for the phone, but he passed it back to Buffy.   
  
Sliding his cigarettes out of his jeans pocket, he lit one, saying to Buffy, “Suppose we should. Or stay a little longer, maybe—let him cool his heels.” He didn’t sound too hopeful, proposing that, and didn’t seem surprised when Buffy replied indignantly, “Of course not!” over her shoulder, bouncing off to change in the cabana.  
  
Spike bent to catch up his T-shirt and slowly pulled it on. Dawn could almost hear the wheels going around.  
  
“What?” she demanded. “Willow gone berserk? Xander has a new demon girlfriend? New apocalypse? What?”  
  
“No, nothing like that,” Spike responded absently, pushing his arms into the sleeves of his button-down shirt, sliding it on, looking around for his boots. Mike, she noticed, was already efficiently gathering the CD/tape/radio and other oddments into one of the empty foam chests, preparing for departure. No way Mike could know; but he apparently didn’t care that he didn’t know, which left Dawn the only one out of the loop and annoyed about it.  
  
Bending to slap sand out of his hair, Spike added, plainly thinking aloud, “Can leave most of the gear, I suppose.” Then he looked up at her. “Bit, collect whatever should go home. Should be bags you can use. Five minutes. Slayer should take at least that long….”  
  
He rambled off down the beach, still in search of his boots.  
  
Since it was plain nobody was going to tell her, Dawn flounced off to help Mike make the judgment calls on what to take, what to leave. Not that Mike needed the advice. Dawn needed to give it--have authority over something!  
  
Pressing the lid onto one chest and setting it aside, Mike remarked, “No need for you to get all bent out of shape about Sue. She’s nothing.”  
  
“I’m not,” Dawn said loftily, vigorously shaking sand out of her hoodie before putting it on. “Why should I care if she’s climbing all over you, kissing and everything? It’s nothing to me. You’re not my personal property. You--”  
  
Mike had straightened: large and calm in the angry light. “Would be, if you’re agreeable. Set my mark on you once, knew where we were then, but that’s all right, that’s over…. Though I’d do it again in a flash, if you once gave the word. Want to. Regardless of what Spike says, or the Slayer, neither. Only yours to call. But you didn’t want that, after Spike marked you and you started to know what it meant, to bear a vamp’s mark, so I saw it got taken off again. Back to the beginning, like I’d never marked you at all. Left you free of that. Because that was what you wanted. So anytime you take a notion to claim me, whatever you figure would be claiming, I wouldn’t say no.”  
  
Dawn was unprepared for the challenge. “I don’t have the right,” she said hastily. “It would be like forbidding you to feed. Or hunt. Or anything else you have to do, that has nothing to do with me.”  
  
“If you asked,” Mike replied steadily, “I’d try. Any of those things.”  
  
And he meant it. Dawn knew he did. Make a promise they both knew he couldn’t keep, and hate himself for failing, and her playing policeman, and it would be awful. “We’re not ready for that,” she said quickly. “I can’t lay down conditions--”  
  
“You already do. And you can’t tell me I don’t abide by them, neither. Don’t come to you except fed up, and not take all of it, so nobody’s died to be the price of your company. Don’t do nothing with you except what you say and want. And it can go on like this, if that’s what you want. Not all I want, though. Not by a long shot.”  
  
Blurting, “I have to find my flip-flops,” Dawn skittered away. She _so_ wasn’t ready for this!  
  
**********  
  
After the SUV was loaded, Buffy shut the hatch and turned to find Spike holding out the keys. Looking at her steadily, he said, “Mike’s gonna take me to collect my bike. I’ll be along in a bit.”  
  
He wanted her to face it all alone. Maybe he wouldn’t show at all--duck out, go unfindable--  
  
“In a bit,” he repeated, knowing perfectly well that she was panicking, and why, the cowardly bastard. “Hour at the most. Couple things I need to do I don’t expect there’ll be time for, later. Time enough to make a proper tea.”  
  
“By now, Willow’s already made tea,” Buffy pointed out, as if that mattered.  
  
Spike didn’t say anything, only waited for her acknowledgment. Not her consent--not the way he’d announced it.  
  
Abruptly exclaiming, “It’s freezing out here!” Buffy pushed past, toggling all the locks, and climbed in on the driver’s side as Dawn slid into the passenger seat. After Mike backed the motorcycle into the street, then blasted off, loud and fast, Buffy keyed the ignition. She immediately turned the heat to max although it would take a few minutes to start warming and blow frigid air until then.  
  
As Buffy eased out of the alley, Dawn asked suddenly, “It’s Angel again, isn’t it?”  
  
“God, no! Don’t even think it! That’s all we’d need!”  
  
“Then what?” Dawn slapped her hands on her knees in frustration. “What’s everybody being all super-secret and mum about? Has my goldfish died and nobody wants to tell me? What?”  
  
“You don’t have a goldfish.”  
  
“But I could, and if it died, you’d be behaving just like this. What’s everybody freaking out about and why won’t you tell me so I can freak out, too?”  
  
Stopped at a light, Buffy held the top of the steering wheel in a death grip and for a moment laid her forehead on her wrists. The heater was finally cranking: a small mercy. Already, she was lonesome for the beach. “It’s nothing. It’s just Giles, come for a visit without telling anybody, so I don’t have anything ready, no food in the house, probably, and maybe I should take a pass by the store first--” (Which appealed not least because it might mean Spike would get there before her. Then _he’d_ have to handle it alone!)  
  
When the light changed, she yanked the SUV into the turn toward the supermarket.  
  
“Oh,” said Dawn, disappointed. “Is that all. It’s that Rayne thing, then. Why show up unannounced about that? Spike already told him he doesn’t know.”  
  
“I totally don’t know, Dawn. After he called, I didn’t think anything of it. And Spike wasn’t-- Wait a minute: Spike talked to him? When was that?”  
  
Dawn squinched up her face, thinking. “About a week ago. Sunday afternoon, I think it was. Spike was working on the translation. Mostly. And I talked to him, too, a little. Said I don’t know, either. The Lady chose, just like Spike said.”  
  
Pulling into the supermarket parking lot, Buffy looked aside at Dawn for a moment. “Then maybe it’s you Giles wants to grill. Not Spike.”  
  
“Oh! Because…of the connection.” Dawn began bouncing anxiously. “I can’t do that, Buffy! I can’t, she’d skin me alive, or come back and force me out of my own personal body again--”  
  
“See? Now you’re freaking. Happy now?”  
  
Buffy took a parking space with no other vehicles around and turned off the key. It was gonna take a long, thoughtful time to choose exactly the right groceries to entertain their guest.  
  
**********  
  
When Spike pulled up to the curb, there was no sign of the SUV.  
  
Well, no matter. At least he’d got himself fed, which was the main thing. Figured it might be a bit of a siege: Watcher hadn’t come all this way to take No for an answer.  
  
Might take awhile before Rupert accepted that that was all the answer he was gonna get.  
  
As Spike stepped down from the Honda Shadow, the front door of Casa Summers opened, spilling light: Watcher, coming out to stand on the porch, arms folded. Heard the bike’s muted rumble of approach, most likely. Well, no use to foot-dragging. Pitching a cigarette, Spike went up the walk.  
  
“Spike,” Giles greeted him gravely as he started up the steps.  
  
“Rupert. Come back inside, then, it’s a bit nippy out. For California.”  
  
“I gather you’ve been away. And incommunicado,” Giles remarked, following him inside, both turning left into the front room and taking their accustomed places: Spike in the big chair next to the weapons chest, Giles on the couch next to where his gear was piled--overcoat, scarf, an overnight bag and a briefcase. On the low table in front of the couch was an empty teacup, saucer, and spoon.  
  
Willow came in then, bearing the usual tea doings on a tray, flashing a glance between Giles and Spike as she set it down on the table. “Oh, good! I heard the door and I hoped that meant-- Where’s Buffy?”  
  
“Oh, she’ll be along, I expect. In a bit. Enough there for two?”  
  
“There will be. I’ll bring you a cup.” She started to hustle off, then turned in the doorway. “What are we doing about supper, do you know?”  
  
Spike shook his head. “Have to ask Buffy. Can always get takeaway, something or other. What time’s it got to be?”  
  
“About six-thirty. Should I call Xander and Anya?”  
  
Was this a crisis Scooby meeting, she meant. Spike thought about it a moment. “No. Or let Buffy call it,” he decided. “Don’t think so, though. Just a nice chat with the Watcher, dropping by, is all. That right, Rupert?”  
  
“You know why I’ve come. And no, Willow--nothing official, not in the sense you mean. Merely a private matter.” As Willow left, and Giles finished messing about with pouring and preparing a fresh cup of tea, then replacing the cozy on the pot, he went on, “Willow didn’t know where you’d gone. Somewhere out of phone range, evidently. And nowhere is out of phone range…on this planet. In any case, she didn’t know. There seems to have been a sudden influx of ignorance here whilst I’ve been gone.”  
  
“Dunno about that.” Scratching the back of a hand, Spike added, “I’m all over salt, sand. Will you be all right on your own for a little? Catch a quick shower, back by the time Red has the tea brewed, all right? Buffy, she should be along any minute now.”  
  
“All right,” Giles responded without looking up. “I’ve waited this long. A few more minutes shouldn’t matter.”  
  
True to his word, Spike made a quick business of showering and toweling off. As he was changing into fresh clothes in Buffy’s bedroom he heard the front door and was down the stairs soon enough to help Buffy and Dawn carry in about fifteen bags of groceries. When everything was piled on the kitchen island, Buffy shot him a look. “You better not have used all the hot water. Dawn, help Spike put everything away. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”  
  
“I have no bathroom rights,” Dawn complained, reaching for a milk jug as Buffy made her escape to the second floor, leaving Spike in charge again.  
  
He smiled at the hand-off dance they appeared to be doing. He hadn’t intended it and didn’t mind, really. He wasn’t afraid of the big, bad Watcher and was utterly determined Rupert would eventually have to leave as empty and unsatisfied as when he’d arrived.  
  
Because once that door was opened, there’d be no end of what came through.  
  
Wound tight as a spring with it, though, the Watcher. And something stubborn and baleful about the eyes, and his willingness to wait. Spike had seen Rupert do that cold resolve before, and it promised to be a pretty fierce dance before it was done. Have to keep Bit clear of it, though, as much as he could….  
  
Crouched to stack cans in the proper cupboard, he said over his shoulder, “When Buffy’s done, you take your turn at the shower--”  
  
“There’ll be no water left!”  
  
“Regardless. Wait a bit first, then, for the boiler to heat a new batch. Anyway, keep to your room. Unless I call you. And I don’t figure to.”  
  
“But I have to have supper! What, am I gonna have a fucking tray sent up, like I was a--”  
  
“Bit, don’t be tiresome.” Spike rose to collect cellophane packets of pasta, boxes of cereal. “I don’t want to bring the Lady into it any more than you do. Watcher’s not in a position to force anything. Not that there’s anything to force. Best if you keep clear, though. As much as you can. Don’t want to get into a fine old punch-out with Rupert…not in front of Buffy. Don’t want it to come to that.”  
  
“Right. You _know_ I can’t, how mad she’d be!”  
  
“The Lady, you mean,” Spike said, clarifying that Dawn was referring to the Power that, for convenience, identified itself as Dawn’s mum. Lady Gates: the Lady of Doorways. When Dawn anxiously bobbed her head in confirmation, Spike said, “Then best you stay scarce. Anyway, you scoot off. I can finish this.”  
  
As Dawn left, Willow came in and started grabbing groceries. Seeing what was needed and doing it, no fuss: a thing he liked about her. She asked worriedly, “Spike, what’s this about?”  
  
“Haven’t exactly talked about it yet, except a little on the phone awhile ago. Best I can make out, Watcher’s bound and determined to find out what's become of Rayne. And no matter what anybody says, you keep completely out of my head or I’ll make you very sorry. I like you an’ all, but that’s out of bounds. Make whatever excuse you want, but don’t you do it.”  
  
Turning from the open refrigerator, Willow gave him a long, assessing look. He looked right back, not shy of her gaze. He could pretty much figure what she was thinking, deducing. Almost as quick as Dawn in that way, sussing things out on the least clue or seemingly none at all. But that didn’t signify, so long as she did what he’d said.  
  
“All right,” she said quietly, returning to her task of stacking yogurt cartons. “It’s not as if I ever do it unless you say, you know. Not for a long time.”  
  
“Know that. Just you keep it in mind, what I said.”  
  
“Your head is inviolate. Right. Yessir.”  
  
Buffy came down, drying her hair and looking perkily nervous, and a poll was taken on what kind of takeaway to order. Then they all made small talk, mostly Giles rabbiting on about who was doing what to who, at the Watchers’ Council, and his chances of being named Head Boy himself, which he now rated as slim to none, since he was here and not there, lining up supporters and advancing his own interests.  
  
“Then why leave?” Buffy asked, honestly confused, and no wonder: she knew the least of any of them present.  
  
“A matter arose,” said Giles distantly, gazing at Spike. “Nothing I’d anticipated. The least, occasional niggling, to begin with. An annoyance that’s gradually become intolerable.”  
  
But Giles left the matter there in the interests of civility until supper had been delivered. As the various cartons were opened and set out, Spike would have taken some up to Dawn but against his advice, she’d come down and helped clear off the table in the den so nobody would have to balance paper plates on their knees.  
  
She whispered to Spike, “Well, it’s not as if he can apply the thumbscrews with everybody here! Besides, I’m hungry!”  
  
It was a stiff, quiet meal until Willow started asking them about where they’d gone, what they’d been doing, and Buffy and Dawn launched into excited accounts of the excursion…suitably sanitized for kiddies and prissy Watchers. Spike had no interest in that and wandered out on the porch to have a cigarette.  
  
In under a minute, Giles came in pursuit, stopping short and trying to look casual when he found Spike had gone no farther than the porch rail.  
  
“Thought I’d do a flit?” Spike asked, idly amused. “Take more than you to drive me from my home, Watcher. After you come all this way, might as well have it out. Tell you again: got no answer for you. Neither has Dawn.”  
  
“Come back inside. I’ve something to show you.”  
  
“When I’m done. Finish your supper.”  
  
“Very well.”  
  
**********  
  
Willow decided what she was hearing was the sound of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The aether crackled with it.  
  
Looking with other sight, she found Giles’ aura flexing, roiling, and changing colors with the intensity of his determination, whipping across the space between to lance at Spike--all below the level of consciousness, she was certain, semi-mage that he was. Giles generally contained himself better. Contained himself completely, in point of fact. The energies were only the intensity of his want, made manifest on the aetherial plane--not outright spells or magickal attack. Nothing she needed to intervene or stop.  
  
Because without effort, Spike was fending it off, letting it pass by or through or around. His aura, capable of flaring the width and height of the room, was ice-white and barely extended beyond body contours. Shimmering like crystal, untroubled and unchanging. Channeling the energies away, as he could channel sunlight; deflecting and defending him from the determined influence Giles was trying to exert.  
  
Mundane senses showed her only civilized impasse: Giles on the couch, leaned intently forward with arms braced on knees, slightly frowning, insisting Spike must have noticed _something_ in the instants of Rayne’s transference elsewhere. Anything, some hint to identify the destination.  
  
Spike, leaned back in the big chair, at apparent ease except for the occasional abortive gesture toward the cigarettes in his pocket, his hands otherwise spread and calm on the chair arms, answering with a question: “Why would I take any notice? Just wanted the git gone, and he was, and be damned to him. Felt myself flying to flinders, Watcher--too much, more than I could manage. Losing…containment. Coherence. Can’t much focus on anything when that’s happening.”  
  
Huddled on the floor beside the chair, Dawn looked anxiously back and forth between them as though she were watching the strokes, approaches, and retreats of a tennis game. Perched at the other end of the couch, Buffy merely looked unhappy to have two people she cared about so obviously at odds.  
  
Willow figured they were into the second set. Spike had won the first, insisting he didn’t know where Rayne had been shoved to, and Giles unwillingly forced to concede that point and come at the issue from more oblique angles instead of head-on confrontation.  
  
Changing focus, Giles began in a patient voice, “Dawn--”  
  
“You leave her out of this,” Spike cut in at once, his left hand dropping protectively onto Dawn’s shoulder. “She’s only the key, the conduit. Told you: she don’t know any more than I do.”  
  
“Dawn, I think we must have that talk we’ve deferred now several times in the urgencies of some crisis,” Giles continued smoothly, as Dawn’s eyes grew enormous in her pale face. “I have now no reason to doubt your contention that you are an…avatar, a resident emissary, of one of the Powers of the universe. Only through the action of such a Power could a mage of Ethan’s skill and strength have been summarily translocated against his will. Is Spike correct, that the action was all the Lady’s, that you had no choice or knowledge of what was done through your agency?”  
  
Dawn sat up straighter, her shoulder against the chair. “What’s that in English?” she challenged, and Spike twitched a small, covert smile.  
  
“Oh, I think we understand each other well enough,” Giles responded. All the same, he simpled it down: “Do you know what was done with Ethan? More than that he was merely sent away?”  
  
“Don’t know and don’t care,” Dawn shot back fiercely. “As long as it was bloody painful and permanent, the worse, the better, as far as I’m concerned. He hurt Spike! Nobody does that and gets away with it, not if I have anything to do with it!”  
  
“Bit,” said Spike, leaning toward her, “all good chums here, yeah? Watcher’s not about to bully a child, try to wring knowledge from her she doesn’t have.”  
  
“But _could_ have,” Giles muttered. “Could get.” Louder, he added acerbically, “And she is _not_ a child, not in any meaningful sense of the word.”  
  
“She’s my sister,” Buffy stated, finally weighing in, although addressing the air. “And I’d be really, really upset if anybody tried to force her to do anything she didn’t want to do.” Spreading her hands imploringly, she turned toward Giles. “I know it’s important to you. But Spike’s said he doesn’t know, and we all know what a really wretched liar he is--”  
  
“Thanks, pet,” Spike growled.  
  
“--so why can’t you just accept it, let it drop?”  
  
“Because,” Giles began, then turned suddenly aside to pick up his briefcase and snatch out a sheaf of papers. Brandishing them at Spike, he declared, “Technically, you may not _know_. But you’ve _guessed_ , haven’t you?”  
  
“What’s that, then?” Smooth and controlled as a cougar, Spike rose and took the sheaf from Giles. He held the packet out, squinting the way he did without his glasses, that he was too vain to wear in front of Giles. All Willow could make out was that it was computer print-out of some sort: multiple columns stretching across the long dimension of the page. Printed landscape, and Spike was trying to read it portrait. Spike shook his head. “Can’t make nothing of this. What is it--footie scores?”  
  
Willow held out her hand. “Can I see?”  
  
Shrugging, Spike passed the sheaf to her. She scanned it quickly, identifying the columns, then more slowly, taking in the data. “It’s a tracking record,” she reported, running her finger down the last column. “Of what user Specialgrant_2 accessed on what days, for how long.”  
  
 _Specialgrant_2_ was Spike’s assigned login name on the database of the Council of Watchers.  
  
Spike was bent forward, staring at Giles. “You been _spying_ on me?”  
  
“Following your recent interests, yes,” Giles replied calmly. “Extracurricular browsing through the source materials. Before the crisis, you downloaded quite a lot of material on the occult properties of silver. Since then….” He held out his hand. “Willow, may I?”  
  
Rising from her straight-back chair, Willow surrendered the print-out back to Giles, shooting a glance at Spike, who now looked angry and sullen at the realization his movements online could be tracked and had been. Willow figured she now knew why he’d been so fierce about her taking unauthorized liberties with the contents of his head.  
  
As Giles said, there was knowing, and then there was _knowing_. Spike _knew_ something, and Giles had caught him at it.  
  
Running his finger down the final column, Giles was reporting, “23rd November, portals, three separate items. 24th November, portal spells, sixteen items, two downloaded, presumably for further study. 27th November, a few things on the registry actually pertaining to the current translation, amazingly. But after midnight, local time, a raft of descriptions of dimensional realms identified and to some extent classified--particularly those categorized loosely as ‘hell dimensions’--and means of reaching them--natural and sorcerous. 2nd December, when you’d presumably studied and absorbed at least some of this material, we have: Quor’toth--three items. 3rd December, Quor’toth--seventeen items, most highly specious and conjectural because so little is known of that realm. 4th December, Quor’toth--four items. 5th December--”  
  
Dawn burst out, “But that’s where--” As Spike spun and glared at her, she suddenly shut up, clapping a hand over her mouth.  
  
Too late: set and match.  
  
In a most unconvincingly mild tone, Giles inquired, “That’s where _what?_ ”  
  
Irritably pulling on the back of his neck, Spike moved a step aside--by no coincidence blocking the line of sight between Giles and Dawn. “So, suppose he’s there. What of it? You any the happier for thinking you can put a name to it now? Changes nothing.”  
  
Buffy raised her hand as though it were a class. When she caught Giles’ attention, she asked, “What’s a Quor’toth?”  
  
“A reasonably infamous Chaos Dimension about which remarkably little is known,” Giles replied.  
  
Spike directed grimly, “Tell her why nobody knows bugger-all about it.”  
  
“Yes, well.” Giles pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Its notoriety is, in part, based on its being used for the disposal of criminals, highly disliked rivals, inconvenient spouses and the like from the Renaissance onward. Links to this dimension appear to be widespread and easy of access. However--”  
  
“One catch,” Spike told Buffy. “Nobody’s ever come back.”


	3. The Doors of Perception

The minute they had Giles out the door, jet-lagged and headed for some motel, Dawn knew they were gonna _get_ it.  
  
As she edged to escape up the stairs, Spike tried to slide through the front door behind Giles except Buffy shoved the door shut and set her back against it, glaring. He innocently displayed his cigarette pack as excuse to be out in the chill where Buffy wouldn’t want to follow. When that plainly didn’t win him any Buffy points, he shrugged and turned back down the hall to escape in the other direction, onto the back porch.  
  
“We talk. Now. And yes, that means you too, Dawnie,” Buffy snapped when Dawn pointed a _Who, me?_ finger at her own chest. Buffy’s implacable finger pointed toward the front room. Dawn and Spike obeyed it glumly, both of them sitting on the floor: penitents waiting for just chastisement.  
  
“It wasn’t my fault,” Dawn protested at once. “I didn’t know, and still don’t. I just didn’t want to get boxed in. I won’t contact the Lady, and you can’t make me!”  
  
Pacing in the middle of the room, Buffy shot her a dire glance. “You’re next.” She halted in front of Spike, taking a wide-legged stance, arms furiously folded to keep herself from punching him out, then and there. “You lied. To Giles, and therefore to me. Giles, maybe that’s one thing. But you don’t lie to me. Never.”  
  
“Couldn’t know he’d show up on your doorstep, now could I? Caught me on the bounce, like. Thought I could put him off and that would be the end of it. With him right here in my face, nothing for it but to keep on, innit? Wasn’t to know he’d been bloody _spying_ on me, was I?” Spike still sounded aggrieved about that, as if Giles’ sneakiness surpassing his own was a mortal insult.  
  
“Spike. You. Lied. To. Me.”  
  
“Not exactly, no, I didn’t! Didn’t actually _know_ , did I?” Spike defended himself, but halfheartedly, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, walking it up and down between his fingers. The soul was probably getting after him, Dawn surmised.  
  
“If you didn’t know, how did you _guess?_ ” Buffy demanded, tapping a slipper toe.  
  
Dawn accused, “You’re gonna hit. If you start hitting each other, I’m out of here. And if you break the new front window, Xander will be sooo pissed! Go have it out in the basement, why don’t you?”  
  
Seeming to think that an idea with merit, Spike started to stand. Buffy clapped hands onto his shoulders and pushed him down again. Spike looked up at her quizzically: they all knew what their fights led into, that sometimes rattled the walls--before, during, and after.  
  
Cheeks flushing, Buffy backed until she hit the couch and flopped to a seat there--safely distant from the temptation of hitting.  
  
Willow, who’d been hovering by door arch, blurted, “This is private. I’ll just--”  
  
“If Giles is in it, and Ethan fricking Rayne, we’re all in it. Sit.” Buffy pointed imperiously at the straight-back chair, and Willow meekly settled there. Nobody much wanted to argue with General Buffy when she had her rant on.  
  
Looking back to Spike, Buffy ordered, “Tell me what you should have told me from the beginning. All of it.”  
  
Spike sighed and slid the cigarette back into the pack and the pack into the pocket of the button-down. “Well, fact is, I didn’t even guess. It was something that Rayne said himself, ranting on about getting his own back on Rupert. By way of revenge.”  
  
“Revenge for what?”  
  
“For turning him over to those Initiative bastards. And then forgetting about him, seemed like. Three years, they had him, or so he said. Had a pretty bad time of it. No surprise there, of course….”  
  
Dawn thought Spike had a bit of a soft spot toward anyone who hated the Initiative nearly as much as he did, had likewise suffered at their hands. Though not to the point he was all boo-hoo about Rayne’s current situation, of course: that altruistic, Spike wasn’t. Despite the soul, beyond immediate family (herself and Buffy), friends (Willow, likely Anya, and the handful of remaining SITs), and their satellite connections (like Xander), Spike was pretty much ruthless and careless as ever.  
  
(Mike fit in there somewhere, and probably Giles; but Dawn wasn’t sure how and dismissed the issue.)  
  
And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have good reason to hate and despise Rayne on his own account--the mage had bewitched and separated him from Buffy, brought on another bad siege of craziness, and hurt Dawn and meant to hurt her worse in an attempt to reopen the Hellmouth, just a couple of weeks back. Spike didn’t forget or forgive things like that. His sympathies were difficult to arouse; but once he’d accepted you, you were in for keeps. His anger, a lot easier to rouse, was also enduring. All you had to do was remember his century plus of mutual animosity with Angel to know that.  
  
“Anyway,” Spike continued, “he said, Rayne did, that first thing he’d do when he got the Hellmouth open again was shove Rupert through to someplace uncongenial. He named Quor’toth. Then, there at the last of it, he yelled that he wouldn’t really have done it. I thought, after, maybe he knew. Maybe at the last, he made out where he was going. And it’s the sort of thing the Lady _would_ do: make his word his punishment. Symmetrical, like.” Spike turned a hand in a sort-of shrug. “So I started looking. Trying to figure if it was more or less likely a Chaos Mage could work a Chaos Realm so as to get back. Figuring what to do, if he did. Then Rupert called, and I didn’t want to give him any encouragement. ‘Cause I knew if I told him, he’d want to get Bit into it, and likely you. Besides me, of course. Red, you too, maybe. On account of the only ways in being sorcerous.”  
  
“And there are no ways out,” Willow murmured thoughtfully, and Spike bobbed his head in confirmation.  
  
“Far as I’ve been able to tell. Fairly famous for that, actually. And certain sure there’s nobody here we’d want to shoot off there, can’t come back, no point to it. Unless Rupert’s daft enough to want to go himself, keep his…whatever Rayne is to him…company there. Or Harris. Wouldn’t miss him a bit.”  
  
Willow warned, “Watch it, Mister!” and Spike smirked unrepentantly.  
  
But it wasn’t a serious suggestion, and they all knew that.  
  
After a silence, Buffy said to Spike, “You were trying to protect us.”  
  
Spike nodded. “Us. And what we have. Apocalypse, that’s one thing--everything’s at risk then and we do whatever we have to, to get through it. Get it done. But I don’t subscribe to that level of risk just because Rupert’s got the guilts for past oversights or lonesome for his other half, now he’s finally got rid of him. Too bad for him, but s’not ours to see to, any way I can figure.”  
  
Another silence, as Buffy thought it out. Finally she said, “And that’s all of it? All the pieces?”  
  
“Yeah,” Spike lied, lifting a clear, untroubled countenance. “As far as I’ve got so far. Don’t want nothing to do with it. Because there’s nothing of use to do.”  
  
Dawn tried not to squirm too obviously. Although she didn’t know full details, tonight wasn’t the first time she’d heard of Quor’toth. Months ago, in the bad time before they’d shut out the First, Spike had named it. The time when Angel had been here, large and in charge, and in an uncharacteristic fit of sympathy, Spike had inquired about helping him with a small problem. Very small problem--an infant son kidnapped away there. Into Quor’toth.  
  
Dawn had shut down that idea fast and hard then and didn’t like it any better now. It would have involved her importuning, uninvited, her larger self, who above all things didn’t like being meddled with. Any attempt at coercion was a gilt-edged invitation to disaster and a likely termination of the inconvenient Dawn. Likely Spike, too, since he wouldn’t let her go into something like that on her own even if she’d been willing, which she was most extremely _not_.  
  
Spike had yielded only the first turn of the knot and was plainly prepared to go on lying like a trouper to avoid giving Buffy any reason to yank and undo the rest. The prospect of doing the same made Dawn feel all itchy and uncomfortable. So she invoked the sovereign remedy for awkward situations: blurting, “I have to go to the bathroom,” she escaped upstairs at a dead run.  
  
**********  
  
As Spike and Buffy were talking quietly, Willow was thinking.  
  
To her, the problem of Quor’toth was mainly a puzzle and a challenge--like the ultimate locked room mystery. She’d never taken particular interest in portals or other dimensions, too busy trying to understand, moderate, and control her powers to want to venture far from home and known forces, familiar parameters. Her stint with the coven in Devon had been forced on her, pretty much. Although she’d accepted that she needed the supervision and strict rules, she’d been desperately homesick the whole time.  
  
She’d never created a portal or traveled through one.  
  
Just the same, she didn’t have to twirl and tug at the elements of the puzzle very long before coming up with a different approach and perhaps an answer.  
  
She considered telling Spike privately--let him decide what to do or not do with it. But that notion was entertained only for a moment before being discarded. She didn’t want to be in the position of having to keep things from Buffy…or Giles, for that matter. She imagined his situation as being like her learning an estranged Tara had been consigned to a hell dimension and was being tortured there. The imperative to rescue, to _do_ something, would have been overwhelming. If she’d learned someone had kept from her something that would have let her end that torment, she never would have forgiven them, no matter how pure and well-intentioned their motives. Would have quite likely gone all black-eyed, veiny, and vengeful on them: she was uneasily aware of how close that _My will be done_ mindset was, even now.  
  
So, no. Clearing her throat, she said, “Guys? There might be a way.”  
  
“To get into Quor'toth and then back out again?” Buffy asked. Spike was looking around at Willow too, conspicuously silent. Reading his lack of enthusiasm, Willow made an aimless gesture. “Doesn’t mean you have to actually _do_ anything about it, but I think you should know all your options before we have to deal with Giles again.”  
  
Bright-eyed and interested, Buffy asked, “So? What is it?”  
  
“Basically, portals are for people. Human people,” Willow clarified. “Demons tend to use natural rifts, like the Hellmouth, because they’re more…singular. Focused. Not all-purpose, like humans. Anyway, I was thinking--”  
  
“Cut to the chase, Red.”  
  
“Yeah, all right. Astral travel. Manifestation on the aetherial plane. I bet, with your strong aura, you could do it, Spike. Your astral body is probably at least as coherent--pretty much the same energies, after all. And there’s your soul-tie to Dawn, to keep you anchored and maybe draw you back, if we had to. Whatever you found there wouldn’t be likely affect you, especially not in your astral body--not even fullscale sun, fire, deep water. Being immaterial, it couldn’t even be staked. You could have a look around, then we’d reel you in again. After all, we don’t actually know if Rayne is even there. It would be good to be certain of that before we even consider anything more fullscale.” Willow looked at them hopefully, waiting for their reactions.  
  
Spike got up and started stalking away toward the back porch.  
  
“I’d go too,” Buffy offered, and that stopped him, made him turn.  
  
Pointing at Buffy, Spike said, “You’ll do no such of a thing.”  
  
Buffy was up and on her feet, too. “Since when do you tell me what I can take on and what I can’t?”  
  
“Since now. Anyway, I’m not going, so it’s dumb arguing about it. S'not our concern. That’s the whole point!”  
  
“No, the whole point is that Giles needs our help, and we owe him, Spike. He dropped everything to come and help get you away from Rayne. We couldn’t have done it otherwise. We all owe him: Willow, too. When he comes looking for help, I’m not gonna turn him away. So we go and take a look: how bad can that be?”  
  
Willow cut in uncomfortably, “Buffy, Spike’s right. Sure, you have the super strength and quick reflexes, the super endurance and the fast healing going for you. All the Slayer attributes. But none of that extends to your astral emination. Your aura is filmy and it has big holes and ragged patches. Even a moderate barrier would pull you to pieces. And if you got into trouble, we’d have no way of reeling you back in. You’re not connected to anything the way Spike’s connected to Dawn. Sorry, but it’s true.”  
  
Buffy was making with the sad puppy eyes and trembling lower lip. “I have aura mange? And nobody told me?”  
  
Predictably, Spike melted, went and held her. “Love, you’ve died twice. Been pulled out of heaven once. Things like that, they leave their mark, even if it’s not one that shows in a mirror. You never had to work getting the Slayer part of you all connected to the Buffy part and it’s not a smooth fit.”  
  
“I have aura split ends?” Buffy mourned.  
  
“Just not what you’re cut out for, love. Please.” Hugging her closer, Spike shut his eyes, laying his cheek on her hair. “Please don’t grieve yourself over such a thing--”  
  
“But we’re a _team_ , we go together, I couldn’t bear being left behind--”  
  
“Hush. An’ I couldn’t bear-- Look. All right: if you promise to stay, I’ll go, like Red says. Try it, anyway. Not gonna do it otherwise--not for no persuasion. So you got what you wanted, each of us taking on the part we’re best at. Nothing fragile about a vamp, except maybe in the head. Always send a vamp in first, advance scout, test out what opposition you’re facing so you can choose the best way to meet it. Only common sense, innit? And doesn’t make no sense otherwise. Hush, now. You got your way.”  
  
“You’ve been played, Spike,” Willow mentioned drily.  
  
“Doesn’t signify. Things are how they are, no matter whether I like it or not. So, love.” Leaning a little away, Spike tilted up Buffy’s chin with thumb and forefinger, then put a quick, soft kiss on her lips with the ease and precision of the utterly familiar. “We gonna do this thing? We got a bargain here?”  
  
Buffy’s answer was to rise onto her toes and kiss him back as though it were a wrestling move or one of the lesser known martial arts.  
  
Willow figured that was her cue to exit, start researching methods and safeguards. In the door arch, she turned for a moment, observing. Their entwined auras were huge, completely filling the room, shivering golden with flares of deep tantric red. The tatters and gaps of Buffy's aura no longer showed, no longer mattered. No telling where one began and the other ended.  
  
With a sigh that was only a little envious, Willow went on to begin her research.  
  
**********  
  
Once Spike had decided to do something, he was impatient to begin and could seldom be prevented from beginning, right then and there. But the first experiment was to be tiny training-wheels only, Dawn gathered: to see if Spike could manifest and inhabit his astral body, venturing no farther than the borders of Sunnydale.  
  
All the same, Willow judged it prudent to have Dawn present in case Spike needed help finding his way back.  
  
By midnight, they were ready to begin.  
  
Yawning, Dawn looked on as Spike stretched out on the couch, far too jittery to relax, Buffy kneeling on the floor and holding his hand. Willow had a ceramic smudge pot fuming on the floor. The smoke made Dawn sneeze and her eyes prickle.  
  
Spike jerked upright to direct Buffy, “’F this goes wrong, don’t tell Rupert we even tried, all right?”  
  
Turning to look over her shoulder, Buffy asked Willow, “Are you sure I can’t go along? It’s only Sunnydale, after all.”  
  
Spike snapped, “Sure, with rifts and leftover spells everyplace waiting to suck you in like blowers in a funhouse. Not a chance!”  
  
Buffy objected, “Blowers _blow_. They don’t suck.”  
  
“No matter. You’re not going. You promised,”  
  
“But that was Quor’toth: this is home!”  
  
Willow interrupted their bickering, thrusting a cup at Spike. “Lie down. Drink this. Relax!”  
  
“’F I lie down, can’t drink it,” Spike grumbled, but chugged the contents of the mug in two deep swallows. There was barely time for Buffy to catch the mug before Spike dropped slack on the couch, his eyes unfocused.  
  
Placing spread fingers on his forehead, Willow remarked apologetically, “A better mage wouldn’t need a potion. But Spike doesn’t meditate, and vamps are so hard to influence magically anyway, have to practically hit ‘em with a hammer but not really, but otherwise we could be all night before we could even get started--”  
  
“Will,” said Buffy tightly, setting the mug aside with her free hand. “Get on with it.”  
  
“Right.” Closing her eyes briefly, Willow muttered a few words, and Spike’s eyes shut. She waited a few minutes, then leaned in close. “Spike. Listen. Hear my voice. You’re anchored here, safe. Feel your aura. Spread it now, as wide as you can.” Her own eyes vague, Willow looked around, obviously checking, then returned her attention to Spike. “That’s good. Feel it extended, aware of the room, and us, and the night. It’s not something strange, it’s you. Feel the wards around the house that keep out anything with ill intent. All safe here. Safe to let go. Your aura is a part of you, you know that, you can feel that. Bring it to a shape that feels good to you. Feels easy and comfortable.” Willow paused for another vague-eyed check. “Good. Now go into it.”  
  
Dawn felt a wrenching _something_ within and made a strangled gulp of distress.  
  
“Dawnie?” asked Willow anxiously.  
  
Whatever had changed, steadied--the soul connection, Dawn guessed. Different, attenuated, but still there. And then a _yank_ \--like what she felt when Spike opened a rift and went through alone.  
  
“Dawnie?” Willow asked again, as on the couch Spike went game-faced, snarling--shifting restlessly as if trying to awaken. Buffy and Willow both pounced on him, Buffy holding tight, kissing and petting his changed face, Willow muttering words and tapping him at the magically receptive points of forehead, eyes, heart, groin. He surged up, then subsided, lapsing back into the trance but still game-faced, still making grumbling, growling sounds of discontent.  
  
“What?” Buffy asked Willow, both of them leaning away, leaving off the efforts to calm and constrain.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Is he all right?”  
  
Dawn put in listlessly, “He’s gone.”  
  
“What do you mean, gone?” Buffy wanted to know.  
  
The drowsy fumes of the smudge made Dawn’s head swim. All at once, she was terribly tired. She curled up on the floor, her head pillowed on an arm, and was instantly asleep.  
  
The agreement was that on this trial run, Spike was only to stay away an hour or so: long enough to get accustomed to inhabiting his astral body, learning how to direct it, how to interpret its perceptions.  
  
When Dawn awoke, the smudge was cold, the front room was full of indirect morning light, and Willow and Buffy were both asleep, leaned awkwardly on the couch--Buffy at the head, Willow at the foot. And Spike was still in game-face, head twitching as though in the throes of dreams of slaughter and mayhem.  
  
Full light, out. Couldn’t be good, might be bad.  
  
Scuffing on her knees, rubbing her eyes, Dawn moved to the couch and closed her hands around Spike’s left arm, that was hers because of the spiral green tattoo he’d had marked there, that signified _Dawn_. Nothing magical, just the outward representation of the connection between them, but with its own power because of the meaning with which they invested it.  
  
“Spike. Come home now. Come back, it’s daylight. Time to come home and rest, lair up quiet in the safe dark.” Trying to feel the inward connection, pull on the immaterial tether, Dawn kept calling him as first Buffy, then Willow, roused all full of cricks and stiffness and tried in various ways to add to the summoning.  
  
After about fifteen minutes Dawn felt a sudden shift within and knew Spike was back. Game face was smoothed away. But he still seemed entranced--eyes wide and amazed, mouth slightly open, completely still and seemingly unaware of them, no matter what any of them did to try to fully awaken him.  
  
Since he didn’t seem hurt or in any distress, they finally left him to attend to bathroom breaks and breakfast. Distractedly crunching cereal, Willow was arguing with herself about the advisability of peeking into his head, just a little, only for a second, hardly at all, in spite of his unambiguous order that she do no such thing, but these were different circumstances, and--  
  
Dawn carried her plate of toaster pastries into the front room, but found Spike gone. Oops! She checked the den, then left her plate there and dashed for the basement, calling an alert as she passed the kitchen so Willow and Buffy scattered to hunt, too. He wasn’t in any of the shadowed corners of the basement, so Dawn charged up the stairs again--and found him wedged small in the corner under the upstairs staircase--a windowless triangular space where absolutely no natural light could reach.  
  
Calling, “Found him!” Dawn went down on her knees, to meet his eyes on a level. “Spike, are you OK? Just tell me you’re OK, and we’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want…. Spike?”  
  
She’d never seen him look like this. The only word that came to her was _rapturous_ and the connected words after: _enraptured; rapt._ As if, in his excursion in spectral form, he’d seen something, done something, _been_ something that’d taken him completely out of himself and from which, even back within his body, he couldn’t disengage. Couldn’t even want to: his eyes, when they flicked to her, were full of happiness and delight. He looked indefinably younger and full of joy, and lifted a hand to her, pulling her down to nestle against his side as though he wanted to share some revelation but hadn’t yet found a way or the words. When Buffy arrived, all worried and concerned, he invited and drew her close, too, and even Willow, reluctantly pulled into the sprawled group hug on the floor. Not unpleasant but uber weird and very unSpikelike. Dawn had the feeling that if Xander had been there, Spike would have wanted to hug him too, which would have freaked Xander out completely.  
  
Willow was already freaked. Leaning away from Spike’s happy attempt to pat her face, she exclaimed worriedly, “What are we gonna tell Giles?”  
  
**********  
  
Buffy was annoyed, upset. First, they couldn’t get Spike to talk. Then they couldn’t get him to shut up. No decrease of weirdness, either way.  
  
After a few mute hours, he started muttering disjointed phrases, about light, and stars, and crunchy grass, and a house that was so very very sad it put him in tears to even think about. Snagging one of Willow’s color-coded notebooks--red, this time--and a pen, he settled on the stairs, a few steps up, alternately scribbling and staring into space. Paying Buffy less than no attention when she went up and down, veering around him; oblivious to her sitting on a higher step and hugging him close from behind.  
  
Leaning to read over his shoulder, she found the whole page full of unpunctuated writing, some words at odd angles to one another as though he was simultaneously trying to draw a diagram and compose a linear narrative. Lots of single words rendered in caps, some circled--STARS; SINGING; SAD. They were the punctuation, standing alone, connected to nothing before or after.  
  
It infuriated and frightened her not to be noticed. It was insupportable that he could be so obviously happy without her, completely absorbed in anything that wasn’t her. She had to stifle the impulse to yank away the notebook and fling it toward the front door. Grabbing one of Spike’s notebooks had once nearly had dire consequences: she wouldn’t do that again.  
  
Finally, that problem was taken care of by Spike himself: after writing, five times, _sunrise, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise,_ all in a descending column, he burst out, “Fuck!” and hurled the notebook so hard its wire spiral binding bent as it hit the corner of the den doorway. Gone game-faced and sudden, he grabbed onto the nearest breakable objects, the spindles of the staircase’s outer railing, and started methodically cracking them out, flinging them away.  
  
Buffy had seen him explode like this before: he’d have the whole railing down and afterward start hammering on the walls, ripping out chunks of plaster and lath, before the fury had run its course. The last time, Buffy had stayed clear, waited for it to burn out on its own. Now she was already angry with him and, for the first time in over a year, the whole house was set to rights, everything tidy and repaired. He was _not_ entitled to go into a tantrum and bring as much of the house down as he could get at!  
  
When he brought his arm back to hurl a spindle like a javelin at one of the narrow windows set either side of the door, Buffy grabbed his wrist, tore the spindle away, and started hitting him with it. Locking hands around her throat, Spike tipped backward, off the now rail-less part of the staircase, taking her with him.  
  
After that, it got fast and wild as anything between them, ever. In the confined space of the hallway, they rebounded off the walls, airborne more than half the time, all leverages ferociously exploited. No semi-playful, amorous sparring here. An all-out fight, punishing and savage as anything in the bad old days. Ribs gave; bruises bloomed. The hall table was crushed to legless flinders. When he came within an inch of getting a thumb into her eye, she whirled and kicked him, full strength, in the crotch, slamming him against the opposite wall, leaving a Spike-shaped indentation in the plaster. He was down, holding himself, no more than a second before he surged up again, fangs bared, roaring. In mid-leap, he collapsed: Willow, on the staircase, had made a gesture, said a Word. Everything went still.  
  
Descending the stairs a careful step at a time, holding the wobbly cracked-loose railing, pale and wobbly-looking herself, Willow said in a voice about an octave above normal, “Always knew I’d need that sometime. I don’t care if he _is_ pissed at me: it was an emergency! Wasn’t it, Buffy? An emergency?”  
  
Breathing hard, Buffy was reining in the impulse to kick him in the head. Several times. Hard. She turned around and slammed her fist into the door of the hall closet. It cracked on a diagonal and the top piece fell off. She glared at it stupidly, trying to back off, inside, from full fight mode. Shuddering and dry-mouthed with adrenaline.  
  
“Will, why’s he like this?”  
  
Seating herself on the bottom step, Willow gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I never heard of a vampire attempting astral travel before. But his aura’s so strong and coherent, he transferred into it all right, there shouldn’t have been any problem--”  
  
“Could something have got _at_ him out there?” Sleepily mussed and in flannel PJs, Dawn was leaning hesitantly over the drooping section of railing. “Nasties on the astral plane?”  
  
“I don’t know, Dawnie,” Willow replied. “We’ll have to wait until he gets back to normal and can tell us.”  
  
Stepping carefully around Willow, Dawn descended to pick up the broken-backed red notebook, soberly scanning the writing. As Buffy considered what Spike could be tied down to that he couldn’t crack and liberate himself from, since the manacles and chains were long gone, Dawn remarked, “Well, at least this tells why he was gone so long.” When they both stared at her blankly, she lifted the notebook as though the conclusion should be self-evident. “He stayed to watch the sunrise.”  
  
That made no sense: every instinct a vamp had was to escape, hide from the sunrise. Buffy shook the thought away. “Dawn, get Mike over here. ASAP.”  
  
As Dawn scampered back upstairs for her cellphone, commenting, “He can come through the tunnel, but he’s real hard to wake up, this time of day,” Buffy made up her mind and headed for the phone on the weapons chest: they were gonna have to bring Giles in on this, no option.  
  
**********  
  
After lunch they convened in the basement, surrounding the steel-framed school desk-chair Spike was almost too thoroughly tied into. Dawn had given Mike her taser in the certainty he’d use it without compunction if they needed to stop Spike in his tracks again. What with the trance spell and then the stop spell, Willow had declared herself all spelled out for the time being, and Buffy didn’t want to risk engaging in another Spike-Buffy go-round for fear of Grievous Bodily Harm on one side or the other. Hence Mike, designated for guard duty.  
  
Evidence of the last go-round was plain--Buffy had sore, swollen knuckles and her ribs bound, preferring to stand; Spike had two gorgeous black eyes, possibly a broken nose, and at least a broken arm, perhaps internal injuries. Nobody had asked what he preferred.  
  
Awake, aware, Spike slouched despondently in the chair, legs out before him, crossed at the ankles. Hints of game-face came and went in his face like shadows. His eyes hadn’t quite turned but seemed to have settled on a half-lidded, muddy green.  
  
Dawn approached him tentatively, trying to avoid upsetting him, which was probably impossible anyway at this point. “Spike? Are you OK now? Are you…yourself?”  
  
Spike’s answer was a surprisingly bitter laugh and a contorted face and harsh breathing, fighting off tears. Finally he said, “Yeah, whatever that’s worth.”  
  
“You didn’t do much damage,” Buffy offered, standing carefully straight.  
  
“But some,” Spike replied flatly, awaiting confirmation.  
  
“Some,” Buffy admitted. “What set you off?”  
  
“Well, I didn’t know it was you, did I?” Spike burst out, as though that were all the explanation needed. “Couldn’t hold onto it, couldn’t make it go into words, dragged back to the fucking demon and it all furious that I’d got away from it even for that little while--”  
  
Dawn interrupted the rant, “Seven hours, Spike. You were gone for over seven hours.”  
  
He finally looked at her, saw her. Focused on her, what she’d said. Frowning, puzzled, responding, “If you say so, Bit. Didn’t seem but the whirl of an instant, all of it coming in, and then the light growing and the sun coming, the shining drops on every leaf of grass, so wonderful….”  
  
With sudden insight, recalling what he’d once told her, Dawn said, “It was like being turned, wasn’t it.” She didn’t need an answer. She simply _knew_. And apparently when he’d shifted into his astral body, the demon had been left behind--the first time he’d been free of it for over a century. “Everything shining and new, without taint, without shadow,” she hypothesized softly.  
  
“Oh, shadows aplenty,” Spike contradicted. “Hurt and wrong and death everywhere. But I was apart from it, could see it plain. And also birth, the new life shining like stars, and the stars too, so clean, so far away….” His voice had become a rapt whisper. “And then the miracle, the rising sun, pink and golden….” Louder, furious again, he declared, “An’ I can’t keep it. Can’t hold it, what it was. Can barely recall what it felt like, how it seemed. An’ it wouldn’t go into words, I don’t have the words to hold even a bit of it. It’s wasted on me, what I am.” On the school chair’s arms, the narrow one and the broader desk one, his hands were clenching and unclenching in despair and frustration of what he couldn’t hold or communicate well enough even to himself.  
  
From the rear of the group, where he’d been quiet and reserved all this while, seeming rather abashed that Spike had taken on this trial willingly to a purpose that was not his own, Giles quoted quietly, “‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.’”  
  
“’And Holy,’” Spike agreed, on a sigh, looking earnestly past Buffy at Giles who maybe understood. “Yeah. Something like that, I guess. Can’t hold onto it, but just for a bit, it was. Or seemed so. But I’m such a fucking hopeless poet, the words wouldn’t come--!” He slammed his hands on the chair arms (the broken bone already aligned and nearly healed, Dawn deduced), and Mike took a step nearer, but Spike merely slumped again.  
  
“For some things,” said Giles gently, “there are no words.”  
  
“But there _are!_ ” Spike protested hotly. “There has to be! How can you know it if you can’t fucking _say_ it? The thing itself or the shape around it, all luminous-like, meaning rising from it as thick as smoke but shining, everything shining--!” Choking himself off again, Spike turned his head, chin hard against his shoulder. “An’ then to come back, be pulled back to this, to what I was….”  
  
“Was the soul with you there?” Giles inquired. “Where you were? As you were?”  
  
“Dunno. S’pose so. Hardly know, now. Wasn’t considering myself. Not with all that there, all so plain, so wondrous.”  
  
“You forget,” Buffy said suddenly, gaze fixed on a point high on the wall. “Remember, maybe, what you felt…but not what it was. I was so sick and hopeless, being dragged away from that, back to this. Losing what had been so simple and right and plain, for everything complicated, all the jagged edges, the violent light….” Kneeling stiffly by the chair, she lifted a hand to the side of Spike’s face. “If it’s anything like that, Spike, you mustn’t ever do this again. Not if it’s like losing heaven.”  
  
Spike looked at her then as he’d looked at Giles before--hopeful, agonized, seeking some correspondence to the literally unspeakable he couldn’t entirely remember or forget.  
  
In a low, apologetic voice, Willow commented, “It isn’t, though. Not heaven. Only the astral plane, where things take on their true appearances. Their essential nature. I’ve seen it, and it’s not so much. To me, it wasn’t. Of course, I hadn’t left a demon, an animus, behind that otherwise moderated everything for me. I didn’t have a soul, freshly freed, expanding in joyous awe to at last see things perfectly plain in their spiritual essences. I wasn’t crazy-desperate, afterward, to try to stuff it into words.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “We see only what we _can_ see, I guess. I was all busy, cool, observy gal, totally locked on finishing my errand, whatever it was. Warding the house, or trying to locate and determine influence, or something basically mundane like that. I wasn’t wide open to it, waiting to be struck by the lightning.”  
  
“Wasted on me,” Spike muttered again. “Can’t even hold onto anything but a few scraps of shell, but the bird’s flown. The sunrise, it was golden and pink and indigo, the glory rising, and I knew it all, felt it all…. But couldn’t hold on. An’ my demon, s’telling me it was nothing, nothing like that exists, s’not but a glamour and a fake when about the only thing I know about it for certain is that it was true.”  
  
“Truth,” Giles said, “is best handled in small doses.” Going to the chair, he set a slow, careful hand on Spike’s shoulder. “That you undertook the Siege Perilous on my account is beyond thanks; and it’s wounded you to the heart. Buffy’s right: you must not attempt this again. Not and expect to find peace afterward. Even though I didn’t ask it, it’s too much to ask. I must find some other way.”  
  
“Didn’t do it for you,” Spike responded sullenly. “Done it so Buffy would leave off about it, and so she wouldn’t go barging into it with her skin off. She’s not suited for such. She’s not had the practice I’ve had, being crazy, seeing everything fifteen ways at once and two thirds of it fake, trying to force it into sense. And ‘f you’ve given over your daft plan of getting that Rayne out of a place there’s no getting out from, we’ll give you three rousing cheers as we boot you out the door and wish you Godspeed to wherever’s not here.”  
  
Since Spike seemed about normal again, ill-tempered and ungracious, Buffy apparently felt it was safe to start undoing his bonds.  
  
**********  
  
When it was dark enough, Spike retreated to the back porch to have a cigarette. It wasn’t long before he felt Dawn come out behind him, accusing, “You’re brooding.”  
  
“Am not. No such thing.”  
  
“Are too. You’re Broody McBroodypants.”  
  
“And what would you know about it, Miss I-Have-No-Hips?”  
  
“That’s mean. Also low. And people with really elevated tastes don’t care about hips. The true connoisseur goes for the enticing smell. Or so I hear,” Dawn riposted glumly. “And, moreover, no one but the utterly crass and insensitive would follow trashing the downstairs hall with loudly breaking a bed with a make-up boinkfest.”  
  
Spike had to smile, pensively regarding the coal of his cigarette. “Slayer healing, that’s a fine thing,” he responded obliquely.  
  
“Doesn’t beat vamp acrobatics,” Dawn stated loyally. “Bet you can even lift that arm now.”  
  
Spike lifted the healing arm--still a bit sore, but serviceable--to show yes, he could. Dawn plunked onto the step next to him in the gap thus provided. She leaned in, so he did the necessary: lowering the arm, holding her close. Like Buffy, she was hot as a little furnace. The contact felt good, a living contrast to the isolated place in his mind where he was no more than a passing consciousness contemplating more beauty than he could bear, more significance than he could take in.  
  
That was all he had left--the impact on him, not the thing itself at all. Gold, pink, indigo. The splendid light, powerful and gentle, and he not afraid at all, gazing at the glory, the deadly forbidden.  
  
“You’re doing it again. Zoning out.”  
  
“Am not. Just thinking. Because I’m a thoughtful sort of chap.” Though Dawn was wearing a heavy fleece hoodie, she was shivering. “Here, you should get back in. Catch your death, blood all thin from the summerlands.”  
  
He didn’t lift his arm, and she didn’t move to go.  
  
“My blood’s perfectly fine, thank you. I have it on good authority. Although you’re not much use as a toaster, you make an excellent windbreak. Summerlands. I’ll forego the pun and just put on imploring face,” (which evidently involved rounding her eyes huge, raising her eyebrows, and tilting her head to maybe an angle of 30 degrees) “and say, ‘What’s that, Spike?’”  
  
“Oh, a tale. From when I was a lad. Nurse used to say. That there was an island to westward someplace, hard to find on account of the fogs that were always there, to shield it, like. Where it was always summer, and the good things to eat, and the music. Sailors heard the music and it sent them mad, jumping over the side and swimming until they drowned. Or some washed up on the shore, after a storm, maybe, and some of them got home again after awhile. But they were never content, always listening for that music. Wandering around pale and gaunt, searching for it, always unsatisfied.” Spike hitched the shoulder nearest her in a small shrug. “Fairyland, more or less.”  
  
“Why did you need a nurse?” Dawn asked. “Were you sick?”  
  
“Sometimes. Not a sound pair of lungs in the lot of us. How my two sisters were taken…. But no, not how you mean. When I was a lad, families with the dosh for it had servants. Cook, butler, housemaid, scullery maid, ladies’ maid, groom for the carriage, and considerable more for the higher folk. For children too young to be sent away to school, there’d be a nurse, maybe a tutor or two. Had a nurse, couple of tutors, there for a bit.”  
  
“Oh.” Dawn thought about it for a few minutes, then said, “Well, you’ve got the pale and gaunt down cold. You want to get back to it, don’t you. Quite a lot.”  
  
“Ain’t done it yet,” Spike replied lightly, and patted her head with his off hand. “Arrow’s not short of the mark, though,” he admitted. “But thing about the Summerlands, it comes at the price of all you have. Broke enough furniture for one day, I expect. Don’t want to sacrifice any more, just ‘cause my demon, it’s all out of sorts that I slipped that tether for awhile. Left it behind. Flew free.”  
  
He thought she’d ask how it had been, to have the demon absent and the soul alone centering him. And he’d have answered “Very strange.” But she didn’t ask that.  
  
Instead, she asked acutely, “When were you a poet?”  
  
“Never. Always. The sort who’d go all trembly ‘cause he’d seen a dewdrop perched on the tip of a blade of grass. You know the sort.”  
  
“Like sort of a proto-geek,” Dawn theorized.  
  
“Worse. Sort that chases after an Ideal Beauty bare instead of getting down to a good, hard fuck.” Spike drew in a long breath. “Never mind that, Bit. Shouldn’t say things like that to you. I’m a bit off.”  
  
“I’d noticed,” Dawn responded dryly. “You don’t like the poet much. Why? Wasn’t he nice?”  
  
“Oh, very nice. Nice enough to gag a pig.”  
  
“Uber-nice.”  
  
“At least that. Thought I’d smothered him out of me long since. But last night….”  
  
“--he was back.”  
  
“Yeah. Seems like.” Pitching the butt-end of one cigarette, Spike morosely lit another. “Terrible waste of the space. Give me some time, I’ll starve him out again. Demon can’t abide him one bit. Things all roiled up inside.” With the cigarette hand, he made a circling motion over his chest. “Since the soul, after the crazy, had a kind of truce in there. Not no more.”  
  
“The demon wants to prove it owns everything, runs everything.”  
  
“Well, it’s what’s kept me going all this while. Tending the works, wanting only a tithe of blood for its pay. Doesn’t like bein’ left alone in an empty house, so to say. Expect it’s entitled to be mad. But while it’s all furious, and taking every chance to show it runs things, I’m somewhat on edge and…distracted.”  
  
“No shit, Sherlock. Did you apologize to Buffy, about the hall and the railing?”  
  
Spike bent his head, smiling small. “After a fashion.”  
  
“Ahuh. And that broke the bed.”  
  
“About that, yeah. Not much of a bed anyways. Needed replacing. Way too small for a grown girl like her, with…company.”  
  
“Acrobatic company. Energetic, even. Enthusiastic.”  
  
“I expect. That too. Though she does her share, with the enthusiastic. Or best I can persuade her to. Sorry, Bit. Shouldn’t get into that. Things get ahead of me, past me just now.”  
  
“Because you’re distracted,” Dawn formulated.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“And brooding.”  
  
“No! Well, maybe a little. Around the edges.”  
  
“Spike,” Dawn began seriously, pursuing a related thought, “don’t you think somebody should tell--”  
  
“No.”  
  
“--Giles about what else is in Quor’toth? Or even--”  
  
“No. That book’s shut now. I came, I tried, I totally fucked it up. End of story. No need to hurt Buffy with the rest of it.”  
  
“Hurt Buffy?”  
  
“Who’s taking my name in vain?” Buffy enquired cheerfully, leaning out the kitchen door behind them. When nobody replied, she stepped out onto the porch, dutifully shutting the door to conserve the expensive heat. “I’ve interrupted something. Don’t bother denying it--I can tell. I’m a minor expert on the different flavors of awkward silence I can produce. Spike, I know you’ve been busy brooding--”  
  
Dawn barked triumphantly, “Ha!” Presumably she’d scored points with that one.  
  
Spike said, “Afterglow, pet. Enjoying it.”  
  
“Sure, with cigarettes, outside, with Dawn and not me. Sure you were. I believe everything you say, because you’re a fountain of truth. You drip truthfulness. Not! Anyway, have you seen Willow? Supper’s almost ready, and I called, but nothing. Did she say anything to either of you about going out?”  
  
“Nope,” Dawn said.  
  
“Not to me,” Spike agreed. “But she was pretty knackered. Maybe she’s having a lie-down. Put something aside for her, she can heat up later, maybe?”  
  
Dawn leaned away, rearing her head back to give him an incredulous stare. “Sleep? Through _that?”_  
  
Buffy’s cheeks went hot. And not just her cheeks, neither. Spike admitted, “Well, there’s that, I suppose. Maybe you should go tap at her door, Bit. Then look and see if she’s there.”  
  
“OK, I’ll do the recon.” Dawn bounced to her feet and ran off inside, leaving the door ajar. Grimacing in exasperation, Buffy shut it.  
  
As she turned, Spike began, “Now, pet, about the bed. There’s the one I had run up special. Basement’s just about ready for it now. Place is soundproofed, piping relocated, all set to specifications, except the bath’s not been put in, need to talk to Harris about that…. Anyway, is it time to put it up? Settle in, sort of, till we figure how to fix yours, get another one, whatever you say?”  
  
“No chains?” Buffy asked pointedly. “No manacles? Nothing bolted to the floor?”  
  
“Still don’t see what the problem was with that. But if you don’t want, no. Whatever you want.”  
  
“Then I guess so. Guess we could give it a try. Lose the ‘Stag at Bay,’ ‘Toreador Menaced by Bull,’ and ‘Elvis on velvet’ hangings, though. They’d give me nightmares.”  
  
“It’s what I could find.” Spike was alarmed by another possibility. “You don’t want to girly it all up, do you? Pink ruffles, an’ all?”  
  
“I think we can find some compro--”  
  
Dawn barged out the door, flinging it back so hard it smacked against the siding. Alarm was boiling off her; her face was bloodless. Before she’d got a word out, or needed to, Spike and Buffy were both past her, going for the stairs.  
  
Vibrant auburn hair fanned wide, Willow lay on her bedroom floor in an elaborately chalked circle--several colors employed. Blue for peace; white for focus; red for intensity and intent; green for sustenance, endurance. Some symbols Spike recognized, but he didn’t need that: he knew from the first glance what this was, what it meant.  
  
Buffy almost lunged forward, but Spike caught her arm, kept her clear of the markings. Willow had brought a pitcher of water with her into the circle. A nearly empty glass stood near her hand. Willow had prepared, sort of, for the long haul.  
  
“Don’t disturb her, love. Could make her lose the connection,” Spike advised quietly.  
  
“She’s gone,” Buffy stated tightly. “To look, on her own. Without saying word one to me about it. To any of us.”  
  
“Red knows what she’s about. Has a good bit of power. ‘M sure she figured to come back on her own, no one the wiser. Maybe she’ll still do that. Be a couple-few days, anyway, before she’ll start to go off.” Buffy made a repulsed face; Spike took no notice, thinking. “Rupert due for supper, is he?”  
  
“I don’t know. I didn’t specifically ask him. Things got a bit disrupted today, you might have noticed. I don’t even know if he’s still here!”  
  
As Dawn ran in, hovering anxiously by the door, Spike told Buffy, “Call him then, why don’t you. Might be he’d know if she should be taken to hospital, plugged all full of tubes, or if we should wait it out, see what happens.”  
  
After a backward glance comprised of affection, worry, and anger, Buffy ran off to find the nearest phone.


	4. Acala

When Dawn bounced down to stretch out full-length on the front room rug, Spike asked, “You ready?” regarding her narrowly.  
  
“I’m fine,” she responded, fluffing her hair so she wouldn’t lie on it, have it pull--an habitual nighttime ritual, though it was only about nine o’ clock. “Don’t worry about me. You just go on and do what you do.”  
  
“I don’t like it,” Buffy said, pacing by the couch. “This’ll be twice in one day, Spike. What if you can’t get back? What if something _happens?_ What if Dawn can’t--”  
  
Though it meant having to arrange her hair again, Dawn sprang up and hugged Buffy and somehow Spike got into it, encircling them both, all macho and protective, which was kind of cute, despite the fact that Dawn was going to protect _him_. To keep him focused, which she was very good at. Or even to need his protection (fat chance), which anyway would have the same effect.  
  
And there was nothing either Buffy or Spike could say or do to prevent her, Dawn reflected smugly, rather happy to be the middle of a Spike-Buffy hug-a-thon. She felt cool and independent and determined--not afraid at all, though the astral plane was (cue creepy music) _the unknown_. For herself, she was afraid of things with too many legs, wasps, bees and hornets; unleashed small yappy dogs of uncertain temper; being helpless with the prospect of pain. Physical threats. By Willow’s explanation and Spike’s report, the astral plane contained none of these dangers. In her immaterial astral body, she should be as invulnerable as some kind of freakin’ superhero, and how cool was that?  
  
Buffy would just have to deal. She hadn’t been able to contact Giles, who might already be on some trans-Atlantic flight, winging home, disappointed. Despite the fuss he’d made about going the first time, Spike took the necessity of doing what they could to recover Willow as a given, almost without comment. Dawn suspected any pretext would have done, any excuse to give in to his yearning to get back there, to have the real thing instead of just frustrating memories. Which meant she was going with, to keep him on track. It was all very simple.  
  
Of course she hadn’t the least clue how to do it. But that was merely a minor detail. She was confident that when the time came, she’d know.  
  
The hug broke up, and hair rearrangement was accomplished. Stretched out to her right, Spike extended his left hand ( _hers_ because of the tattoo), as if against his better judgment: he’d said he didn’t think she could follow him, and he didn’t want her there. So giving her a point of contact should be bad. Contrarily, if she could and did, he wanted to keep her close. Hence the hand.  
  
Smiling, Dawn took it, wrapping her fingers tightly into his palm, feeling his thumb lock down. She’d expected both of them to have to meditate, prepare. Instead, she felt a pull and went with it, flinging herself in the direction of the pull almost the same as when she followed Spike through a rift, except they were still in Sunnydale.  
  
But very high up. High enough to see the entire town cupped in its valley. But not distant, either. Anywhere she turned her attention was distinct and peculiarly _itself:_ a house on the opposite side of Revello, decrepit and peeling paint, revealed a jolly, teasing personality, its loose shutters tipped at a jaunty angle, imbued with decades of happy, if raffish, habitation. The better-kept house beside it brooded in upright disapproval like a fixed glare.  
  
Dawn tried to understand what she saw.  
  
Neither house looked different, and yet it _did._ It was like comparing a routine photo, she thought, with a painting of the same subject. A photo showed the shell; in a painting, the subject was luminous with meaning. Or like the difference between meeting a stranger and meeting a friend….  
  
The movie theater, downtown, gave off a strange mélange of eager, innocent dreams, lust, hunger, and dread--no wonder, since it was one of the prime vamp hunting sites. In fact, the first evening show was letting out and the hunt was in progress. It was odd to see the people moving like sleepwalkers, so little aware of who and where they were, a little like watching oblivious fish school and scatter; and the half dozen or so vamps, points of emphatic dark, the sharks of this water, choosing their targets and moving in.  
  
One of the vamps was Mike. Not game-faced yet but intent, focusing on one man and then dismissing him because he had a pungent mark, a healed vamp bite, already on his throat. Someone else’s mark. _Spike’s!_ Dawn conjectured--an astonished realization. _Spike’s been playing catch and release!_  
  
That thought distracted her, made her wonder where Spike was. Following the pull of connection, she lifted and rose, searching, and rose higher, along the edge of a diffuse glittering fog…. It was Spike. Either he’d grown very large, or Dawn was exceedingly tiny. Maybe both.  
  
His outline was like dust motes shifting in sunlight or like fog illuminated by a moving flashlight beam. Contours hazed into visibility--his legs, set into habitual prepared stance, lead foot and anchor foot, at rest but ready to move, a pose she’d seen him assume a thousand times, so she knew the rest of it, the set of his hips and the power waiting, balanced and coiled, low in the spine--and then faded as some new vista emerged. The spread of his shoulders. The column of neck. Finally his face, lifted and sublime: he was looking at the stars.  
  
So Dawn had to be about the size of a gnat. That didn’t bother her. What bothered her was that he’d forgotten her: utterly caught up in the hyperreality. As she had been, she acknowledged guiltily, deciding not to get on his case about it. At least not right away.  
  
 _Spike? Aren’t we supposed to be looking for Willow?_  
  
He blinked and leaned away, trying to focus, which was funny: apparently in his astral body, he was still farsighted. Or so accustomed to being farsighted that he imposed that on his form. Like having legs, hands, a body at all: his sense of himself, projected. Whereas she was--what?  
  
She felt like herself but couldn’t see herself. She was only a moving perspective, nothing beyond her gaze except any outward form of herself. _Like a floating eyeball._  
  
She wasn’t sure if she’d said that or only thought it. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference.  
  
 _Bit. You’re green._  
  
 _Never mind that--let’s do what we came for. Who knows how much time has passed? Buffy will be having kittens!_  
  
 _Buffy…._  
  
She’d only succeeded in distracting Spike’s attention in a different direction--back to the house on Revello, and down, and inside, to the front room where Buffy was frozen in mid-pace, one foot hanging suspended in the stopped time as Spike’s avatar swooped down and swarmed all over her, and there Dawn’s body was on the floor, and it was all just too weird. Some way, tiny as she was, she yanked Spike’s avatar out of there back to where he’d been, so power and size weren’t equivalent, and she was considerably ticked off.  
  
 _Spike! For heaven’s sake, focus!_  
  
 _Yeah. Right. Look for Willow._  
  
 _What do we look for?_  
  
 _Dunno, do I? I expect…something like us._  
  
 _Something the size of a water tower or a pea? That’s helpful!_  
  
 _No: something…diffuse._ The response was thoughtful, and Dawn quickly realized he was right. The panorama of streets, houses, stores, miscellaneous offices, a gridwork surrounding Sunnydale’s abundant cemeteries, was all solid and definite, almost too detailed to take in. They were of different stuff--more fluid, reconstituting themselves in ambient energy from second to second, like the id monster in _Forbidden Planet._  
  
 _Look for early CGI_ , Dawn thought, and adjusted to scan on a different frequency.  
  
Although apt to be snagged by the minutiae of the familiar, yet unfamiliar, surround, Spike mostly stayed with her. _Like a dog off the leash investigating smells,_ Dawn thought. Whereas she was pragmatic and purposeful. She was aware of the fairyland enchantment but it didn’t resonate for her as it clearly did for him. Because she wasn’t a poet, maybe; or because, inexperienced though she was, she felt this as a normal mode of being, maybe from the time the Lady had usurped Dawn’s body and Dawn had been left to rusticate in the Lady’s realm, bodiless, exploring the divisions and considerations into which the Lady organized her sphere of interest, the aspects of the multiverse under the Lady’s influence and rule.  
  
It wasn’t nearly so demanding as steering Spike, drunk, but keeping track of his wanderings did take some of Dawn’s attention. So he was the first to spot something, focus, and move to it quick as a thought.  
  
It wasn’t Willow because there were two of it: indistinct humanoid outlines, one shedding inchoate energy like a fountain, the other so dim it was barely a sketch of particles against the void.  
  
Dawn knew the two were in conversation, communion of some sort but could feel only sadness, hopeless longing, desperate frustration.  
  
 _Rupert, you seen the witch anywhere about?_ Spike asked.  
  
As the solider phantom lifted its head and became recognizably Giles, the fainter phantom dissolved into the dark and was gone.  
  
 _Bloody hell!_ Giles erupted.  
  
 _So you can reach him,_ Spike observed. Which logically made the vanished wraith Rayne, Dawn deduced.  
  
 _Barely, and only under optimal conditions, which you’ve just disrupted!_  
  
Dawn decided intervention was in order.  
  
She told Giles, _Willow’s spelled and tranced herself and is lying in her bedroom like Snow White, sans casket and dwarves. Buffy couldn’t reach you, so we came looking. Have you seen her?_  
  
 _Dawn?_ was Giles’ uncertain reaction.  
  
 _Yeah,_ Spike replied, _gone all Tinkerbell, no notion why. So Quor’toth--if that’s where he is--isn’t so shut as the accounts claim. Traffic back and forth. On this level, anyways._  
  
 _He’s been haunting me for weeks,_ Giles replied raggedly. _He’s not certain where he is, but the very fact that he can’t create a portal suggests Quor’toth. Primarily, he’s manifested in singularly excruciating dreams. Alone, he hadn’t the energy to do more. I hoped, meeting on this plane, both of us trying, we might be able to establish a more stable connection. Then you lot had to blunder in and overwhelm the rapport!_  
  
 _Making a lot of progress, were you?_ Spike inquired skeptically. _All set to drag his backside through and shove it out the other end?_  
  
 _No,_ Giles admitted. _And he’s forbidden me to try. If a mage of his experience can’t escape, he’s convinced the most I’d achieve is to trap myself with him. Which might be an improvement over the present impasse. But Ethan says I only think that because I have no experience of such a place. He says it would send me barking mad, in point of fact. Spike?_ Giles’ tone was acerbic. _Since you asked, you might at least do me the courtesy of attending._  
  
Material or immaterial, Spike didn’t much do courtesy. He’d let his attention be drawn away, Dawn saw--gazing wide-eyed at the stars. But with purpose, this time. Focus. Because one was moving. Falling.  
  
Dawn wondered if she should make a wish.  
  
 _Come on,_ Spike directed curtly and took off, Dawn right with him, toward where the star’s trajectory meant it should impact.  
  
Dawn didn’t think a star should approach screeching, but this one did. Stars didn’t have tails, only comets, but this one was trailed by an energy signature whose eldritch brilliance filled half the sky. Like Giles (arriving to join them) leaking incompletely used magic, only more spectacularly. Mostly, Dawn doubted stars were afraid.  
  
Without impact, it was among them like a cloud. Then with a flick, a change of focus, it was Willow, grabbing at them with immaterial hands, wild-eyed and wailing, “Go! Now! It’s coming!”  
  
Before her connection to Spike dragged her away to sudden breath and solidity, Dawn saw that above, a whole swatch of stars had been occluded by something vast and dark, pursuing.  
  
**********  
  
As the storm broke, it seemed as if the house was under occult attack. Buffy barely had time to wince at the flare and crack of lighting before the visceral boom of the thunder hit like a hard punch to the stomach. It was like being pinned down by an artillery barrage. The Weather Channel (just before the power went out) called it a freak winter storm; a few minutes later, in the dark, as Buffy scrambled for candles, hailstones began pattering, then banging, then roaring, almost drowning out the thunder. _Small arms fire,_ Buffy thought, shakily lighting a third candle.  
  
She’d thought she was being metaphorical until Dawn wrapped long arms around her and shrieked in her ear, “It can’t get in. It can’t get past the wards.”  
  
Buffy felt a flood of relief: they were back, then. Much sooner than she’d hoped, even: only a few minutes had passed. Two or three specially loud bangs of thunder, nearly simultaneous, made them both jump. In the bright-black flicker of lightings, Spike was silhouetted against the front window--game-faced, roaring. Apparently he didn’t think it was a natural storm either. Before Buffy could reach him, he was off into the hall, headed cellarward, which maybe was a good idea if a tornado or two got thrown into the mix. Given the current level of bombardment, Buffy couldn’t rule it out although tornados were unheard-of in any season, west of the Rockies.  
  
Huddled together, the sisters made a sort of sack-race progress along the hall to the basement door, where they found Willow hunched into the triangular niche under the stairs, eyes tight shut, chanting. All three accounted for. Reading her the riot act for taking off like that could wait: pushing candle-holding Dawn ahead, Buffy dragged Willow, still chanting, down the basement stairs.  
  
The freshly soundproofed basement wasn’t quiet, but it cut the deafening bangs and booms by at least half. Able to think, and hear Willow chanting, Buffy ran back up the stairs to slam the door and shove the bolts home. She didn’t know if that was necessary or even useful, but it made her feel better.  
  
Descending, she saw that the other basement door--the one that led into the new escape tunnel--was ajar. _Spike._ Racing down the black tunnel with arms stretched wide, she crashed into Spike and the door at the far end just as it was opening. For a second they were struggling--she to shut the door, he to pull it farther open. He let go, so she won.  
  
Setting her back against the door, she demanded, “Are you crazy? Dawn says the wards are all that’s keeping it out, whatever it is. And you want to make a hole in the wards?”  
  
She was blind as the proverbial bat, but she knew he was only about a foot away by the harsh pull of his furious breathing. All wound up and probably still in game-face, too. Teetering on the edge of another mindless explosion to vent the rage.  
  
“For a second,” he said, more growl than words. “Just a second, to get out. Shut it behind.”  
  
“So you can do what?” she challenged.  
  
“Face the bloody wanker! ‘F it wants a fight--”  
  
“Face what? Fight what? Rain? A deluge of hailstones that would mash you flat in a second? Oh! The SUV!” Buffy hated to think what the assault of hail was doing to it, parked in the open gravel stretch off the back yard. If its alarm was going off, she couldn’t hear it. Nothing she could do. She found Spike and wrapped arms about him. He was shuddering with the frustrated imperative to go out and challenge whatever was besieging them here. Totally insane. Totally Spike. “My house,” Buffy said. “My rules. We sit this one out until we know what it is we’re fighting. What works best against it. By the numbers: start with research. We’ve never faced a weather demon before, that I remember. Giles will--”  
  
“He’s still here. Someplace. Had to get back to his body, I expect: some motel or another.” Spike’s arms closed about her and his cheek rested against her temple: tacit acceptance of her calling him off. “’F he lasts this out, we got a lot to talk about.”  
  
Buffy filed that as a topic for another time. “You got Willow back. That’s enough accomplished for one day. Come on.”  
  
They turned, her arm around his waist and his around her shoulders, to return to the upper door.  
  
**********  
  
As the house moaned and creaked, buffeted by gusts of wind, Spike found the custom bed’s disassembled frame in a back corner. With nothing better to do, he lifted out headboard, footboard, and side pieces, and began bolting them together. Bolts and locking nuts were all handy in a box on the floor: that Harris was a methodical worker, Spike had to give him that. No wrench, though.  
  
He found if he could snug the wood up good and tight, mitered notches meeting true, he could push the bolt through, then tighten the nut with his fingers enough to hold until it could be done properly. When he moved to the far side of the footboard, Buffy was there, holding the side rail level and ready for connecting. Nodding appreciation, Spike crouched to insert and tighten the next bolt. It was much easier with the side piece held steady and horizontal, the footboard not trying to collapse onto it.  
  
Given what the bed was gonna be used for when the basement was free of onlookers, Spike liked that they were assembling it together. Though the frame was solid oak and therefore weighed a few hundred pounds as a unit, between them, he and Buffy could lift and walk it into position against the wall smoothly, with no effort at all.  
  
Willow, apparently done reinforcing the wards, and Dawn (giving hand signals and supervisory advice) helped with laying the oversized foundation in place, then the mattress on top.  
  
As soon as the mattress was down, Buffy toppled gratefully onto it crosswise, arms flung high and eyes wearily shut. Wasn’t any point, then, to looking around for the bedding, so Spike launched himself and landed hard--by way of a test, like. All the joints held, and the bed barely shifted. Good enough. Buffy curled up against him, all soft in all the right places, warm all down his front, so eminently fuckable that it seemed a pity not to do her then and there, as he wanted to.  
  
But there was Bit, clambering across the half acre of mattress to tuck in at his back; and there was the witch, slowly collapsing like a dying diva, on Buffy’s far side. And there was the storm, still raging full-blast, as best he could tell. Not gonna chase Bit and the witch back upstairs, to the dark and the scary noises, while that was going on. This was sanctuary; they shared it with equal entitlement. And Buffy, she’d be scandalized if he tried to start anything with so much company….  
  
There were also all the as-yet unspoken things a storm like this portended, none of them likely to be a whole lot of fun. That gave an extra layer of comfort and satisfaction to being together, all of them, and entirely in the body. Just the simple pleasures of quiet, the warmth of contact, safety from the deluge and pyrotechnics outside that couldn’t touch them in this cozy refuge.  
  
So on the whole, Spike was willing to be philosophical about not getting his end away, just now. This was good, too--gently holding, warmly held. Giving himself wholly over to the moment, he nuzzled into Buffy’s hair, the fine scent of her, and let himself drift.  
  
**********  
  
No question: the SUV was trashed. All the glass was broken, sagging in crazed, limp sheets where it hadn’t been blown out altogether; black streaks on the hood suggested the engine had taken a direct lightning hit; the air bag had done its thing and collapsed, entirely filling the front seat area; every part of the body was dimpled by hail. And as Buffy approached, walking carefully on the still-crunchy hailstones, she could smell leaking gasoline.  
  
“It’s history,” she called despondently to Spike, who was hovering just within the morning shadow the house cast on the grass--for moral support, maybe.  
  
“Maybe it’s just sleeping,” he called back, and she wheeled and gave him a glare.  
  
“It isn’t funny, Spike!”  
  
“Sorry. So it’s an ex-parrot, you figure?”  
  
Buffy gave a flat rear tire a rancorous kick. The axle collapsed. Throwing her hands in the air, she walked back to where Spike waited. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do. I guess insurance will cover some of it, but what am I gonna claim? Act of God? What--”  
  
“Don’t fret, love. Not much, to get the DeSoto running again. Day or two.”  
  
Spike started to hug her but she shrugged him off, stomping a couple of paces into the full light where he couldn’t follow. She didn’t want to be consoled or presented with reasonable alternatives. She wanted to be upset and miserable and worried about the logistics of transporting groceries. She wanted to contemplate patrolling on foot again, three-quarters of the time taken by just going and coming. She wanted to know who (or what) the hell was responsible for trashing what was, in her mind, at the moment, her sole and only means of getting anywhere. So she could cut it/him/her/them off at the knees.  
  
“Or,” Spike ruminated, “I could sell the bike.” As Buffy swung around--astonished, touched, even--he went on, “No, scratch that. Sell the witch, maybe. She’d fetch a good price in some quarters.”  
  
Buffy set her hands on her hips. “You really, really better be kidding, Spike.”  
  
“Well, s’not like I suggested selling Bit,” Spike rejoined, mildly indignant. “Too skinny. White slavers, they like a little more meat on the bones.”  
  
“Your bike is probably an ex-parrot, too,” Buffy pointed out with a certain satisfaction, refusing to even think about the bizarre suggestions he was coming up with.  
  
Retreating a step as the shadow’s margin slid nearer, Spike turned his head, uncomfortably looking elsewhere.  
  
Checking, Buffy found the motorcycle neither parked at the curb nor smashed to screaming red (with tasteful skull) flinders in the street under one of several downed trees. “What did you do?”  
  
Hands stuffed in pockets, Spike retreated another step. “Got on the cellphone before the whatever, the tower, went down. Told Michael to come, wheel the bike up against the house there in back, by the porch. Seemed like the best place--inside the wards, an’ all.”  
  
“You are the fricking limit! You brought somebody clear across town, in record incredible bad weather, baseball-sized hail, to move your frickin’ _motorcycle?!”_ Buffy cared nothing about Mike--it was just the principle of the thing.  
  
“Well, that’s what minions are for, innit? Do what you tell ‘em? He’s a vamp, Buffy: break all his bones and he’ll still heal. And wasn’t him that storm was after--it was us. Here. And he has an invite, all proper, so he could pass the wards. Who else was I gonna call to see to it? Who else is under my word in this piss-poor excuse for a town? So what if he’s the Master Vamp of Sunnydale in all but name? So long as he comes to my word, I still got something of my own here, some choices of my own left, not just--” Spike stopped himself for a second, but the explosion wouldn’t be held. “--not just trailing along behind--”  
  
“Hi,” said the ten-foot blueblack creature that’d come up without either of them noticing.  
  
It was more or less humanoid, with two visible teeth/tusks, one protruding from the lower jaw, one descending from the upper. Its eyes had epicanthic folds and wandered independently. Large, flattened nose with conspicuous hairy nostrils. Major ugly. Bright red hair--not auburn, not strawberry blond: _red_ \--in short flamelike whorls all over his head. Dressed casually in outsized jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a denim jacket.  
  
Buffy thought dazedly, _He wouldn’t fit into the bed._  
  
The creature gestured apologetically with his right hand. “I can tell I’ve come at a bad time, you two are having a thing, so I’ll keep it brief. I don’t mean to be crude, but you and your little witch should mind your own business. Respect the Balance and nobody has to get hurt.”  
  
It took the whole speech before Buffy realized the creature was talking past her…at Spike.  
  
She also realized she and Spike were beyond the wards, in broad daylight, and unarmed. And this, apparently, was the opposition.  
  
Sudden as a punch, she shot out her hand, smiling to show every well-aligned, symmetrical, and recently brushed-flossed tooth. “Hi! I’m Buffy Summers. And you are?”  
  
Slightly surprised but deciding to be civil, the monster briefly enfolded her hand with the care of one picking up a pea. So it was tangible: it could be killed. “Make it ‘Cal.’ I have other names, but they’d sound strange to you.”  
  
“Try me!” Buffy encouraged. Information was always of the good. She didn’t like Spike so silent behind her but it didn’t seem a good time to turn and check. “Is ‘Cal’ for ‘Calvin?’”  
  
“No, for ‘Acala.’ It’s a kind of role, a title--like Slayer. So ‘Cal’ is better for conversation. Maybe you’re the sensible one here: you stay where you belong.”  
  
So he not only knew who she was, he knew she hadn’t been part of last night’s expedition.  
  
Buffy shot back, “I go where I’m needed.”  
  
“Well, that’s good. Good. Because there’s no need for interference. Interference threatens to upset the Balance. Which, as a matter of fact, you’ve done on a number of occasions. Not criticizing, just observing. I usually don’t concern myself with internal matters, and you have an august patron.”  
  
That would be Lady Gates. Hence the fence-mending heavy-handed goon visit in person today after trying to smash her house flat last night, Buffy figured.  
  
“So my past misdeeds are _not_ the reason you trashed my SUV?” she inquired pleasantly, still smiling and wide-eyed.  
  
“Incidental damage. I was making a point.”  
  
At the last second, Buffy decided it wouldn’t be a great idea to give her opinion of what he’d been making.  
  
Acala went on, “I wasn’t, at first, aware that an avatar of the Slayer was involved. You didn’t ‘show up on my radar,’ as it were.” Having uttered this pleasantry, the monster showed a few more teeth--crooked, the size of tent pegs. “But rather than let that be an issue….” Acala gestured, and the SUV leaped to attention, tires swelling, pockmarks expanding with a barrage of popping noises. The steering wheel unkinked and slurped up the air bag in stealthy embarrassment. The greasy black flash-fire marks vanished from the hood. All the window glass sprang up and flowed into its accustomed GM-approved curvatures. As a coda, all the locks popped.  
  
“A full tank of gas?” Buffy’s jaw had begun to ache, holding that smile.  
  
“At these prices? Don’t push your luck.”  
  
Buffy shrugged elaborately. “It was worth trying.” Since for the moment they were playing at being all good pals together, she risked a glance over her shoulder.  
  
At the very edge of the shadow, beginning, faintly, to smoke, Spike was standing with two swords.  
  
Assessing the balance, the implicit choreography, of the moment, Buffy mouthed silently, _OK_. The right-hand sword flew to her and she took it, already whirling. It clanged against Acala’s sword…that hadn’t been there a second ago. It was fully six feet long and shivered like living flame. She had no idea where he could have hidden it but it was there now and solid enough to make her arm tingle with the impact. She countered the block, disengaging, waiting to see what the next turn in the dance would be. And she felt Spike come to her back, at her left shoulder, so they could separate and take the monster between them…in the full sunlight.  
  
There was no choice. Solemnly she raised the sword vertically before her, bowing slightly. Acala also bowed…and vanished.  
  
Dropping the sword, Buffy gave Spike a hearty shove, pitching him all the way back to the front steps, crying, “You idiot!”  
  
“What?” he protested, bouncing up. “I could’ve managed. I was just getting warmed up!”  
  
“You were _smoking,_ Spike!”  
  
“That’s just to get me charged up proper. Then the wing thing kicks in and I channel it. But I have to be right at the point of burning, see, to get it started. I--”  
  
She grabbed and held him hard, face buried against his shoulder, saying indistinctly, “I’ve _seen_ you burn, Spike. And I never want to see it again. Let’s not push our luck.” That reminded her, and she turned to look at the restored SUV. “Cheapskate,” she spat. “The least he could have done was throw in a tank of gas.”  
  
Letting go, turning away, she trudged back into the sunlight to retrieve her sword.  
  
At least the hailstones were melting. So it wasn’t a total loss.  
  
**********  
  
“I’m staying,” Dawn declared, plunking herself down on the floor in easy grabbing distance of the TV's power cord--an implicit threat. The only way Buffy could get her out would be to drag her, and if Dawn went, she was taking the TV with her.  
  
“She’s staying,” Spike agreed, dropping into his usual corner armchair, his eyes steadily on Buffy’s. For good measure, he barricaded Dawn between his outstretched legs and the TV stand. “Lady Gates comes into it, seems like. That’s her patch, Dawn’s. An’ she was with me, t’other side, which was what tripped that Acala’s alarm.”  
  
“No,” said Willow dispiritedly, puddling on the floor past the end of the couch and wilting against it. “That would be me.”  
  
Munching popcorn, seated on the couch with her legs curled under, Anya opined tartly, “As it should be. You were the only one prepared and qualified. The astral plane is noplace for amateurs.”  
  
“I concur: Dawn should remain,” said Giles, opening his briefcase on the coffee table.  
  
Standing alone in the middle of the front room, Buffy twisted her hands anxiously. “I don’t want her to be a part of this.”  
  
Dawn commented quietly, “I’m already a part of this. I’m seventeen now, Buffy. By the time you were seventeen, you’d already died once. Let’s be a teeny bit realistic here.”  
  
Though nobody had yet said the “G” word, Dawn was certain they all had Glory on their minds: ordinary demons could make things happen but they couldn’t make them _unhappen_ with a twitch of a finger--Buffy had already described the untrashing of the SUV. So what, if they did? Dawn wasn’t a helpless, whining child anymore: she could _do_ things. At least, in collaboration with Spike, she could. And anyway, so far there’d been no specific threat to her in particular. She wasn’t the target.  
  
“Could we get started?” Anya put in. “I’m losing valuable retail time and I had to call Wilbur in early. He’ll try to charge me extra for that.” Wilbur Banks, that Dawn mentally tagged “The Chinless Wonder,” was the part-time clerk Anya had recently taken on, now that the Magic Box was open evenings. Mike had told her Anya had courted him for that position but he’d declined, having larger fish to fry than an exciting new career in retail.  
  
A few vamps held steady jobs. Not many, though. They hated routine and conforming to abstract rules like punctuality and not eating the customers. Also, night jobs weren’t plentiful and cut into their fighting, feeding, and fucking time--the traditional three F’s of vampire existence.  
  
Buffy checked her watch, then glanced out the front window at the early winter twilight darkened by the absence of functional street lights. “Xander should be just getting off. He said he’d come straight from the site. So he should be here in a few more minutes….” Taking a step toward the hall, she asked, “Anybody besides me want a soda?”  
  
“Beer,” said Spike, crossing his ankles.  
  
“Beer?” Buffy’s tone was between uncertain and disapproving.  
  
“Beer,” Spike responded firmly. “Sun’s long past the yardarm an’ if I have to sit and listen to you lot yammer on, here in the Summers No Smoking Zone, has to be compensation. Beer. Several. Watcher?”  
  
“I’ll stay with tea, thanks,” said Giles without looking up, inspecting papers from a folder. “Somehow sleep eluded me last night; I’m sure I needn’t explain why.”  
  
Raising a hand, Willow requested, “Citrus Jolt: I’m undercaffeinated.”  
  
“I’m good,” Dawn said, doing a small happy bounce as Spike’s palm settled reassuringly on her head and began stroking her hair.  
  
It was to be a fullscale Scooby meeting, research cum war council, in full session by candlelight, the power not yet having come back on; and she was being allowed to stay, an equal partner. A first, a milestone.  
  
Before Spike had popped the tab on his second beer, Xander arrived, sporting more layers than _Finnegan’s Wake_ from working all day in the cold. Shedding garishly checked and colored flannel shirts and several ragged sweaters, he explained that part of the mall roof had collapsed--a combination of the weight of water and a tree disobligingly toppling onto it--and his construction crew had been detailed to repair it on a rush basis, since their power tools could be run off a generator. Several of the interior shops had already suffered damage to their fixtures and merchandise; their proprietors had banded together to offer triple-time for a super-fast repair job.  
  
Rubbing his hands wearily up and down his dark-stubbled face, Xander also requested beer since “the platinum menace” was being indulged. More from habit than actual annoyance, Dawn thought, Spike showed him two fingers backhanded and stretched out deeper in the chair, cradling the beer can on his chest. Fairly amicably, as Xander reversed the straight-back wooden chair and straddled it, arms folded across the top, they started discussing installing a downstairs bath, complete with humungous tub, until Buffy returned from the kitchen and handed Xander his beer, implicitly calling the meeting to order.  
  
As usual, these days, Buffy presided.  
  
The first thing was to bring Anya and Xander up to speed on the out-of-body experimentation on the astral plane. Willow did that. Then Giles took the floor, explaining with tight control why he had reason to suspect Ethan Rayne had been consigned to Quor’toth, briefly interrupted by Willow’s dashing out to get the laptop, to take notes. Clicking the necessary keys, she reported sadly that the local connection to the Internet was still down, but the battery life was fine and should get them through. But she was really, really wanting to Google the name Acala.  
  
Apparently glad of the change of topic, Giles leaped ahead past the storm to this morning, eliciting from Buffy a description of the critter, with occasional comments by Spike, who seemed otherwise content to let Buffy make the running on that subject. He was working on his third beer and frowning, sometimes muttering a rude word under his breath. Dawn surmised that Buffy’s preventing him from immolating himself still rankled.  
  
When Buffy had got through the magically-appearing sword and the suddenly vanishing ogre, Giles tipped his head back, murmuring, “Acala. Indigo blue: that suggests Hindu iconography. Attributes including a sword, whorled hair. Associated with fire, lighting bolts and their attendant storms, like the Norse Thor. But Oriental eyes.”  
  
“Ring a bell, Watcher?” Spike asked alertly, despite his indolent pose of disengagement. He compensated by sipping more beer.  
  
“A faint one. Perhaps. I wish I had access to my resource materials! The local library…. Even the university library….” A sigh indicated Giles considered them hopelessly inadequate. “My recollection can be amended later, when I can inspect the relevant texts online. But Acala isn’t the name I associate with that image, that set of attributes: it’s Fudo.”  
  
Making screwed-up Incredulous Face, Buffy blurted, “Fido?!”  
  
“Fudo,” Giles repeated with patient over-distinctness. “Or more properly, Fudo Myo-o. A staple of one of the offshoots of Buddhism, chiefly in Japan and principally a discipline and practice of the priestly class rather than the general public. Fudo is the principal member of the _Godai Myo-o,_ the so-called ‘Five Great Kings,’ all fierce and warlike in aspect, who struggle to conquer Illusion and wrong thinking and lead the soul to choose self-abegnation as the path to true enlightment. If memory serves, Fudo is known as ‘The Immovable’--that doesn’t bode well--and is associated with the sun and fire: not that promising a connection for you, Spike. Typically, Fudo is depicted as holding a flaming sword in his right hand and a noose in his left. The noose is for binding demons,” Giles concluded with a Significant Look.  
  
“Not a demon, then,” Spike drawled.  
  
“If anything, a demigod. In some urban syncretic sects, in fact, he’s been identified with Michael, Archangel, and with the Cherubim--apparently a lesser order of angels--set to guard the closed gates of Eden with a flaming sword. Tradition conflates him with Azrael--the Angel of Death.”  
  
“Nasty packet. Well traveled, though.”  
  
“Only suggestions, not firm identities. Iconic images and deities are transmogrified in their passage through various cultures. The divinities of one are often the arch-demons of another if the first is conquered or falls into disfavor and persecution. Moloch, in particular, never traveled well. Infanticide, baby-killing, however tempting on prolonged overseas flights, never endears itself in the long run. Pride of progeny, however annoying, seems a human constant.”  
  
“Dunno about that,” Spike responded, pretending to pick a piece of fluff off his knee. Dawn knew that not being able to get Buffy pregnant (though Buffy swore up and down that children just weren’t in the Slayer’s job description and that vampires therefore made ideal mates, no ucky precautions needed, and Watchers should therefore be all YAY about such pairings, not all _Get thee behind me!_ and _Perish the thought!_ and _Fate_ \--literally-- _worse than death_ , the way they actually were), was one of the things, like lacking bodily warmth, he was uneasy about.  
  
Dawn knew this, of course, from Buffy, not Spike, who didn’t tell her the really personal stuff anymore.  
  
The doorbell rang, simultaneous with a few measured light knocks. Not urgent, just insistent. Maybe Buffy had ordered pizza delivery. Dawn didn’t stop to think that the power and the phones were out. Calling, “I’ll get it!” Dawn hopped up, grabbed a candle, and sprinted to the door. She wasn’t stupid: before throwing the bolts and pulling the door open, she checked the side window panel. No need for precautions.  
  
“Hi, Oz.”  
  
Standing rumpled and diffident on the dark porch, Oz replied quietly, “Hi, Dawn.”  
  
But not so quietly that vampire hearing didn’t pick it up: from Spike, loudly, “Oh bloody hell!”


	5. Explanations, Explorations

Spike’s first impulse was to walk out. But before he could do more than pull his boots in against the chair and stand, Oz was in front of him, crossing the length of the room to him first and directly, saying softly, “Hi, Spike.” Not offering a hand, just waiting for acknowledgement and acceptance by the dominant male of a subordinate.  
  
Pack deference: good manners according to whatever passed for werewolf etiquette.  
  
Didn’t matter that the next second the girls had all crowded around wolf-boy. And Harris, too, pulling him into a back-slapping hug. Head turned, Oz kept his eyes on Spike’s until Spike committed himself to the extent of a curt nod. Only then did Oz consider himself released to the greetings.  
  
Didn’t change anything, really, Spike grumbled inwardly, pacing past the group hug he wanted no part of. Runt was still what he was: willing lapmutt to the Powers, running their errands, unquestioningly doing whatever they told him to--at last notice, through some medium or other in Anaheim. Oz showing up meant one of two things--that the Powers sided with that Acala and wanted them to back off; or that they didn’t, and wanted them to take on that Acala, that sparkled on the plane of the real the way Giles or Bit had (for instance) on the astral plane. That therefore wasn’t rightly, completely _here_ and could call up swords out of noplace, manifest eighteen feet tall or thirty or a hundred (whatever he thought would look intimidating), and manipulate matter at will.  
  
Spike had never taken to shape-changers. You never properly knew where you stood with them. And fighting them was a nasty, prolonged business: they’d take mortal wounds and just shift to a new, unwounded shape. Greasy, slippery, unreliable sort of buggers.  
  
As bad as trying to fight water.  
  
Not Oz, though, Spike admitted, coming to an indecisive halt in the kitchen. Hadn’t but the one shape to shift to and was a shrewd, fearless fighter in it, which Spike supposed was all right. And wolf-boy knew his place, had come to Spike first thing: the dominance had been settled between them on Oz’s previous visit, some months ago. Once put down, he _stayed_ down, so it wasn’t a constant slap-and-turn battle of engagement and backing off, the way it was with Mike. And Oz didn’t carry a grudge about it, neither. Good natured, handy chap in most ways. Knew his showing up wouldn’t be welcome but still came to Spike first.  
  
That did a lot to mollify Spike’s anger.  
  
Besides, he was curious which flavor of bad news the mutt had come to deliver.  
  
He glanced at the rear door, his intended destination, then made up his mind and wheeled to the refrigerator to grab out a six-pack of the minimally acceptable swill that was American beer. Pacing back to the front room, he twisted a can free of the plastic bands and silently offered it to Oz, who’d taken a place on the floor in front of the TV, by Dawn. Oz calmly nodded thanks and took it. Spike settled back into his chair, pulling out a fresh beer for himself and letting the rest of the pack dangle and drop into the gap between the chair and the weapons chest. If Harris wanted another beer, he could crawl and grope for one, or he could ask. Either would be fine with Spike.  
  
Interrupting Oz’s dutiful account of his doings since they’d last seen him, Spike asked bluntly, “So what’s Bit’s mum want now?” and ignored the winces and disapproving looks that earned him. He didn’t care: he didn’t dance to the Lady’s tune and wasn’t shy about saying so.  
  
Oz thought for a minute, likely getting together what he was supposed to say. “That she’s aware of the situation--far more than any of you. There’s a history to it, and I’m to explain about that. She says it’s a matter of complete indifference to her whether you engage or disengage but in either case, there are things you all should know that won’t be found in any arcane text, since they’re internal to the Powers.” Oz nodded apologetically to Giles, at that; Giles nodded to show he’d taken no offense and waved Oz to continue. Reverting to his usual brevity, Oz concluded, “That’s all. Except for the history.”  
  
Giles started to ask for the history but Buffy intervened: “Let’s keep to the order. Willow, it’s your turn: exactly why did you go all Sleeping Beauty on us, with no notice, no anything? You said before that it was you, that set off the mystical alarms. Got chased back here by Acala, brought all that fun down on us. Why? Where were you?”  
  
Nervously picking at sweater pills, seeming unaware of Oz’s steady, warm gaze turned to her, Willow replied, “I made a portal. To Quor’toth. It was easy. Flick of the fingers stuff. But I didn’t go except in astral form. Just hovered, using the portal as a target but still anchored back here. I thought that would be safe enough, and I’d be able to confirm, or not, that Rayne was there. Sorry, Giles: I overheard most of what you two said. No real way not to, it was leaking all over, but it was personal and I didn’t mean to.”  
  
Looking horrified and constipated, Giles responded tightly, “I understand. Go on: did you confirm his location?”  
  
Willow bobbed her head. “And I also know why he can’t get out: Quor’toth’s a magic sink. Natural or created, I don’t know. There are no rifts--none at all--but anybody can get in with the simplest portal spell. On that side, though, the magic can’t recharge. It’s sucked up the minute somebody tries any.”  
  
“Magic sink,” Spike found himself clarifying. “Like what we done to Digger’s lair. That, with the silver.” Then he was annoyed at himself for contributing, for engaging, and downed the rest of the beer and crushed the can in his hand to make himself feel better.  
  
“Yes, but on a grander scale,” Willow confirmed. “That whole dimension is magic-negative. There’s no ambient force to draw on, and it sucks in any that’s supplied from outside. That’s why it’s so easy to make an ingoing portal, I imagine. And why it was so hard for me to stay within it--not be pulled through.” For a moment, she looked pleased with her achievement. Then her face fell. “Then that thing, that Acala came, and it was so _big!_ It was like a near approach from the Death Star, and it was pushing me in! And I ran, I had to, and automatically homed in on the only connection I had--”  
  
“Our conversation,” Giles supplied reservedly. “To me.”  
  
“Yeah. And Spike, a little. Wasn’t listening in, not a bit! But you’re loud, Spike. Even though I don’t listen, I really don’t, you’re just blasting away like a rock station and I can’t help hearing even though I can’t make out the words.”  
  
The comparison made Willow’s admission go down a little easier. Spike didn’t mind thinking of himself as a rock station, even though it meant he was spewing himself, uncontrolled, to the aether. Hadn’t had much chance to practice, had he? And that poet, that git William, was all about the fucking _effulgence_ anyway, and on the astral plane he wasn’t to be confined, like a boy’s first visit to a brothal.  
  
Spike was still uncomfortable and embarrassed about that side of it and kept still.  
  
Willow went on, “Brought it right down on you. Had to get home, to get some leverage: shut it out. And it followed us back here, too. And then this morning. So it’s all my fault. I’m sorry. I thought…. I thought if I went, Spike wouldn’t have to. Again. It had hit him so hard--”  
  
“S’all right,” Spike felt forced to say, gruffly. “Just wasn’t used to it, right at first, is all.” Not looking at the witch, he popped the tab on another beer. “Did better, a little, the second time.”  
  
“Because I was there to keep you on track,” Dawn put in smugly.  
  
“Maybe,” Spike conceded. “Maybe so. Teensy little thing, she was,” he told Buffy, remembering fondly. Likely it was the beer. “You should’a seen her. No bigger than this, and shining green, all tiny Tinkerbell.”  
  
“Not my fault,” Dawn responded quickly, “you went all ‘bestride the universe’ hugeacious!”  
  
“Never said it was, Bit. Guess things there are the size they think they are--right, Red? An’ when it comes to _size_ , I’ve never been one to be modest.” For that, he looked at Buffy a certain way, and it was possible he was smirking.  
  
Oz choked on his beer. Spike sociably offered him another.  
  
“I can see the Peter Pan part,” Buffy said, trying to cut him back down to size, the way she did, not admitting that she loved it except alone, and without words. “Some people never grow up. Not in a century plus. Always, the juvenile snark!”  
  
“That’s all right.” Taking no offense, Spike waved grandly. She was being the Slayer, all business, and he always let her have her way about things then. It was when she was being merely Buffy that he’d lately had trouble giving way, wanting to settle the dominance there, demon wanting to enforce its rights on what, however beloved, was essentially a cow, and subordinate, to its perceptions….  
  
Spike lost the next little bit, turning that realization in his mind, uneasily revolving and tugging at it, because that wasn’t what he meant to do, how he should feel toward her regardless. What he’d been doing, all the same, he now recognized: especially when the demon was all riled up and determined to settle things properly and to its own liking, brooking no opposition. That tussle in the hallway. And the bed-busting shagfest, after--hardly less aggressive, truth be told, but Buffy would put up with it then, at least sometimes….  
  
William, resurgent, meant that Spike was losing control of his demon. Like he couldn’t contain both or control either. That bothered him.  
  
When he’d followed that thought to no conclusion, it was apparently Oz’s turn again, and he was delivering the received wisdom of the Powers about that Acala--who was apparently a Power, too. No joy there, then. And not much surprise.  
  
“They’re called the Guardians of the Balance,” Oz was explaining. “Seems there’s two ways of looking at them--that there are actually five of them, or only one with a fivefold nature, and the rest are avatars.”  
  
Buffy said, “He called me that: an avatar. What’s that mean, Giles?”  
  
“The Godai Myo-o. The Five Great Kings. Excuse me, Buffy, I was thinking. What did you say?”  
  
“Acala. He said he hadn’t expected to run into an avatar of the Slayer. He meant me. What’s an avatar? What did he mean?”  
  
Giles fussed with his papers, giving himself time to consider. Looking up, he replied, “I would imagine he meant that he considers there is only one Slayer, and each individual Slayer, like yourself, is simply that aboriginal, eternal Slayer in a new form. All basically the same, sharing in the nature of the unchanging Slayer essence. The Platonic Form, if you will.”  
  
Spike drank beer, not letting on that he understood.  
  
Giles continued, “For all I know, that may be a correct interpretation. When a Slayer is Called, certain abilities are added to her own and not merely awakened within her. She does, to some extent, partake in the uber-Slayer, with the occasional memories of other Slayers’ experience to call upon, the prophetic dreams…. So it’s a possible interpretation. And one that a being with indwelling avatars, different selves it could assume or send out independently, would be likely to adopt. An interesting question, but one that changes little, from our perspective.”  
  
“Think you’re wrong there, Watcher.” Spike straightened in the chair, finally willing to commit full attention. “That Acala, he dealt with the Slayer with respect. Left off fighting when she did. Fixed her van, admitted junking it was a mistake he’d made before he knew who she was. May have next to no regard for Buffy, no more than he did for me. But the Slayer, or what he thinks is an avatar of the Slayer, that’s got some weight with him.”  
  
“Oh, that was just because Frodo was nervous about offending our ‘august patron.’” Buffy dismissed the idea, but Giles looked thoughtful.  
  
“I believe Spike may have a point. He was there, as I was not. And when it comes to matters of dominance, he can be an acute observer. Vampires are highly sensitive to matters of rank and hierachy. From the initial effort to suppress, subsume, the demon, one supposes. In point of fact, I've written a small monograph on that subject." Giles paused a second to look modest in a prissy, Watcherish way. When it was plain nobody gave a fuck about his scholarship, he went on, "Don’t take it lightly, Buffy--whether it is, in fact, true or not, it could be a basis for negotiation rather than unchecked battle, that Acala may have tentatively classed you as something like an equal. And it seems that he has: having delivered his warning, he disengaged without a fight. And also, unasked, put what you claimed as your property to rights.”  
  
“’Frodo?” repeated Oz quizzically.  
  
“Fudo,” said Giles, making a weary face at Buffy’s habitual mangling of unfamiliar names. “A designation of his principal avatar.”  
  
“Oh,” said Oz, in a tone of discovery.  
  
“You know of Fudo?” Giles asked.  
  
“Sure. Pretty much the patron saint of the samurai. Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, and all that. ‘The Immovable.’ It connects.”  
  
“Certainly. I’d forgotten that aspect of his legend. Willow, do see if the blasted internet is available yet. I must have my books!”  
  
As Willow scrambled up to comply, Oz’s eyes followed her. Only when she was gone did his gaze return to his hands, as though surprised to find himself holding a beer. Then his eyes flicked to Spike--to see if his own interest had been noticed, most like. And Bit was looking too, catching the unspoken byplay. Quick little thing, couldn’t mostly get nothing by her. Spike turned a hand, indicating it was none of his concern if the wolf still fancied the witch, and Oz nodded slightly, relaxing.  
  
Spike wondered what Bit made of that: she wasn’t as used to reading the wolf, and sex things frequently passed right by her unless they made loud noises or broke beds. The one exception. In that one respect, she’d held herself far short of seventeen. Maybe it was an awareness the monks hadn’t thought to build in, not expecting her to last long enough to need it. Maybe it was an effect of her keyness--to keep her ready and charged, like, rather than all hormonal and distracted like most teenagers panting after some git or another.  
  
Not his problem. But hers, maybe; and Mike’s. And so out of step with the rest of her keen awareness, it worried him sometimes, not knowing how he should judge it, feel about it….  
  
A break seemed to be commencing, Buffy standing down and asking Oz if he could stay to supper, Harris wanting to know what the Pacific Northwest was like, interlacing murmurs of conversation. Spike could take time out for a smoke.  
  
That, as much as anything, had helped him push away impulses to turn astral just for the odd unoccupied few seconds, get back to the clarity and brilliance the poet and the soul seemingly couldn’t get enough of: couldn’t smoke there. And every time he gave in, the demon was more insistent on its rights when he got back. Unlike Red's, his jaunts hadn’t yet been detected, that he knew of. And Buffy wasn’t shy about calling him on anything she felt as a separation; and she was right to. It _was_ a separation. And when it came to abandonment, she had sensitive feelers everyplace, alert every minute for that. He couldn’t hope to get by with it, especially with the time not being the same there as here. An entire day could be a minute, or a few seconds could take seven hours in passing, this side.  
  
That awareness didn’t make him want it less. It only made him circumspect, sneaky, and careful. But if he didn't quit, eventually she was sure to catch him out, and then the blow-up would make their dance in the hall look like a picnic.  
  
It was true: the Summerlands came at the price of all you had, and there was no peace afterward. Best to shut it away, try to forget. Be in the moment, in the body, and let the rest go. Not think about it…the way he was doing now.  
  
Couldn’t smoke there. That was enough reason to stop.  
  
Poking in a pocket for his cigs and lighter, he headed for the front porch and its safe evening darkness.  
  
********  
  
Since the power was still off, supper was a grill-out in the chilly yard with Xander, the self-designated Master Griller from the months when all the SITs were in residence, presiding, wearing two towels pinned at the shoulders into a kind of poncho to keep the burgers and hot-dogs from spitting grease on what he claimed were his “good” clothes. Maybe they were: Dawn had seen lots of his other clothes, and they were worse.  
  
Happy and excited by the unusual circumstances and unusual company, Dawn drifted from one conversation to another, snagging a hot-dog and bun and slathers of mustard when tongs-wielding Xander announced the first batch ready.  
  
It wasn’t Terminal Beach, but it was still fun.  
  
Gesturing with her hot-dog, she asked Giles to write down the URL of his study on how dominating the new demon led to vamps’ preoccupation with one-upmanship, who got to boss around who, and he promised to do it once he could reach the CoW database again. The paper sounded interesting and might make better sense of the otherwise demented dance Spike and Mike were doing, that anybody sensible would have backed out of or declared a draw or even a victory, just to stop worrying about it, but not them!  
  
She’d heard from Buffy about the bike-moving incident. If the phones were working, she was sure she’d have had a looong conversation of listening to Mike griping about how ill-used he was, that Spike wouldn’t go thirty feet outside to push his own motorcycle to safety, until it was her turn to try to explain why staying indoors, within the wards, was one of the more sensible things she’d ever known Spike to do. She wondered how badly Mike had been banged up by the hailstones and how long he’d therefore be in healing. If he could be wheedled into returning to the beach next weekend, say, assuming Spike could come out of his drifty funk long enough to open the rift for them.  
  
Although Spike could eat human food, half-burnt burgers on buns weren’t high on his list of favorites. So he’d gone off on his bike, so conspicuously not saying where he was going that he was probably hunting, or scouting for vamps not where he thought they belonged on a Tuesday night, so they could be legitimately dusted per _Lex Spikus._ Possibly both.  
  
Dawn had wanted to pin him in a corner and quiz him about his new “catch and release” program that left the prey alive but marked in a way only the bravest or stupidest vamp would touch. She wondered if it was working better than the stinky lily perfume Willow had made up at his direction, that Spike had tried (with a notable lack of success) to train vamps to avoid. She thought she still had a couple of squeeze bottles of it someplace….  
  
Obviously Mike had noticed Spike’s new street game, because he’d veered off, respecting the mark. She wondered what Mike thought about it--whether he resented the interference or was copying the strategy himself because Mike could stop, not drink the prey dead, if he really wanted to, since that was her condition for his visiting her.  
  
She hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, when he’d been summoned for guarding-Spike duty, and he’d been all business then, passing her taser back wordlessly before he left, down the tunnel. She wondered if he was mad at her about something she’d done, or not done, or their conversation on the beach….  
  
She shouldn’t be obsessing about Mike. It was dumb. _Let_ him play his kissy-face games with Sue the Skank, it was nothing to Dawn…and nothing to Mike either, or so he said, and that was so gut-twisting frelling confusing…!  
  
Passing by with a droopy paper plate, Buffy locked and burst out, “Dammit! It’s Tuesday, right? Dawn, is it Tuesday?”  
  
“The last I noticed. Why?”  
  
“It’s class night! I’m supposed to be at the Civic Center in…” (There was sleeve shoving and watch checking.) “…in twelve minutes! And I forgot to remind Spike, he won’t show up, I’ll be there all alone…!”  
  
“Buffy. Buffy, wait before you totally freak out. It’s vacation, remember? As in, no school. Notice me not being in school. My own personal self. I don’t think exercising is high on anybody’s list right now. You might have two dorks show up, that obviously need a life, but--”  
  
“If there’s two, even if there are only two, I have to _be_ there. They paid, and that’s like a promise, right? I could have canceled but I never even _thought_ about it, not working has totally screwed up my sense of time, there’s still time to cancel for Thursday, I guess, and two, two wouldn’t be so bad, maybe I could manage two….”  
  
Dawn found herself the trustee of Buffy’s droopy plate as Buffy raced inside to change. As she delivered the collapsing plate to the folding table near the grill, Buffy raced across the far end of the yard, dove into the SUV, and peeled out.  
  
“What,” asked Xander, watching the brake lights and then the headlights come on, “the burger was too well done?”  
  
“Her class,” Dawn sighed, sliding the plate into place near the monster jar of pickle relish. Anya had wangled them a case wholesale, last summer. At a discount. It was probably several lifetimes worth of pickle relish. Dawn was beginning to hate pickle relish, which would make it last even longer. Like those fruitcakes that were never actually eaten, just passed around from one unwary recipient to the next, getting staler and harder until they were the embodied inedible essence of all fruitcakes….  
  
“Forgot, huh?” From sympathetic, Xander went to a slow, secret smile with a quirk at both corners. “And Spike went…where?”  
  
“He didn’t say.”  
  
“A-huh,” said Xander, rocking on his heels and happily gazing toward the street. “Do you want to make the popcorn for the show when he gets back, or should I?”  
  
“You do it, if you want,” Dawn responded listlessly. “I’m all popcorned out.”  
  
She scuffed away, only to be accosted again by the back steps.  
  
“Dawn. Hey.” It was Oz, his head cocked like a dog’s. But that wasn’t fair or nice, all the things Spike called him, so Dawn tried not to think of them.  
  
Another blow-up meant she probably wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, either. Maybe, though, lacking a free upstairs bed, they’d have the common courtesy to take their frelling make-up sex to the basement this time. That was a hopeful thought, but she didn’t feel hopeful about it. Everybody running away or unavailable had her feeling all depressed.  
  
“Hey,” she responded politely to Oz's greeting. Suddenly, her duties as default Summers hostess crackled to life like a charge of static electricity. “Do you have a place to stay?”  
  
Oz nodded toward the street, where something was maybe parked--Dawn couldn’t tell without the street lights. “The van. It’s fine. As long as we don’t get another storm like that. I grew up here, and that’s not normal weather for Sunnydale. Fudo?”  
  
“Seems so.”  
  
“Yeah,” Oz said thoughtfully, then mentioned, “I wasn’t done. I didn’t tell them about the history. Where have….” He paused delicately, but Dawn knew well enough who he was asking about.  
  
“Buffy’s gone to her class, where there’ll be maybe two people. Spike’s gone to try his new brilliant plan of biting people on the neck to keep them safe from any vamp except him. I imagine he has quite a stable by now. Or a barn, considering they’re cows, not horses. I’m sure they’ll both be fascinated, though, when they get back. If they don’t bring down the downstairs hallway, ceiling and all.”  
  
Frowning in puzzled concern, Oz took her arm. She yanked rudely away, screeching, “Leave me alone!” like she thought he was a child molester, and everybody looking at them, at her, and the only possible action was to race upstairs to the bathroom and lock herself in, running the shower so nobody could hear her snuffling into a towel. Spike would have heard her regardless, and cracked the locked door open if he had to, and not put up with her nonsense for a second. But Spike wasn’t here. Likely, after a hearty snack or five, he’d zip across to Never-Neverland, didn’t need her help to get there, he could do it just fine on his own, give the fucking poet a treat, another night out on the town. He’d been sneaking off: a minute here, five minutes there. Dawn knew from the dazed, blank look in his eyes afterward.  
  
She wanted to run off, too. It wasn’t fair everybody could run off but her--even Willow. She’d have settled for being a green twinkle in Neverland, or for stomping and yelling in the soft warm sand of the changeless Terminal Beach. Those being unavailable to unaided Dawns, she took the next best choice: stealthily unlocking the door nobody had noticed was locked, racing to her room, diving under the covers, and turning the electric blanket up to 10 before recalling that the power was out in her room, too.  
  
So she jammed on her headphones and turned the CD player (it ran on batteries) up to 10 instead. The rhythm and wailing of Nine Inch Nails (it was an “oldies” CD, one of Spike’s she’d borrowed without quite remembering to ask) almost drowned out the guilty sound of the shower she’d left running. Use up all the hot water: it would serve them right!  
  
Wondering why she was the one who had to get stuck, why everything had turned so dismal and hopeless, Dawn yanked the covers up over her head.  
  
**********  
  
Methodically and rhythmically, Buffy thumped her forehead against the steering wheel. The fact that there were no street lights, no traffic lights, should have given her a clue. Out the windshield, the Civic Center stood dark and locked. Of course: no electricity. No heat. She was the biggest dunce on the planet.  
  
Off down the street, a single light approached. Smooth as a bird, it banked into the turn, jumped the sidewalk, and came purring across the grass to stop about a foot from her door. Crooking a knee across the saddle (or whatever it was called), Spike lit a cigarette, all the while looking appraisingly at the dark building.  
  
“Figured it’d be shut,” he commented, sliding his lighter away and breathing smoke with what seemed more relish than usual, “but I figured I better check, just in case they had a generator or something. Looks like they don’t, though. Anybody show up?”  
  
Buffy practically fell out the door and onto him. Somehow, he kept the bike balanced and her as well, cupping an unembarrassed hand under her butt and lifting her until she was pretty much perched on his lap, which she considered quite a good place to be.  
  
“Somebody been mean to my little Slayer, then?” Spike crooned into her ear. “So long as it’s not more’n twice as big as the Sears tower, you point it out and I’ll take it out for you. Just say the word.”  
  
Buffy kissed him urgently, overcome that he’d remembered when she hadn’t, and moreover hadn’t said word one of snark about the depth of her dumbth. “I don’t deserve you,” she whimpered.  
  
“So you believe it now, do you? About time.” Carefully he pushed and slid her forward, back onto her feet at the side of the bike. “Get yourself on proper: I don’t hold with that sidesaddle nonsense, not at ninety miles an hour.” As she looked in confused distress at the SUV, he directed, “Lock it and leave it. Expect all the would-be carjackers have been eaten--last night, now. Field day for vamps, it is, tonight. More hunting than finding, though, I guess. Didn’t see a lot of headlights, coming from home, did you?”  
  
Thinking back, Buffy had to shake her head. The fact was, she didn’t remember seeing _any._  
  
Spike commented comfortably, “Sensible people keeping to home, what with the dark and the cold. We should, too. Lock it up, ride with me: you know you want to.”  
  
Buffy gave the smirk the kiss it expected and asked for, then firmly pressed the thingie that chirped the SUV’s doors locked. “That’s my girl,” Spike commended as she slid on behind him and clasped him tight around the waist.  
  
“Go.”  
  
“Where, pet? Straight home, is it?”  
  
Buffy shook her head emphatically. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see it--he’d feel it. He knew. He always knew.  
  
He’d found the beach for her.  
  
It would be freezing on the bike at even moderate speed. She didn’t care. Among his many talents, Spike made a fine windbreak. “Just go.”  
  
“Scenic route it is then,” Spike responded cheerfully, letting the bike roll ahead, pushing the gas a little, leaning them into a perfect turn, smooth and rolling decorously across the parking strip and down the driveway, just a walking pace, maybe five miles an hour. Lifting his head, he looked halfway around, asking without words if she was set, ready. Her answer was to press her cheek to his back and hold on harder.  
  
In under a minute, they must have been doing sixty and Spike was laughing, she could feel it, from the sheer glorious speed of it and still accelerating.  
  
The bouncing headlight beam couldn’t illuminate the road ahead as fast as they reached it. But with vampire night-sight choosing the way, Buffy had no fear of potholes or downed tree limbs. No fear at all.  
  
**********  
  
Oz’s van was kitted out for flood, famine, or flaming doom. It had a generator. It therefore had lights and heat. It had a refrigerator, half filled (by no coincidence) with 20-year-old scotch and Jack Daniels. Bugger must have been told Rupert was likely to be in attendance. Also ice. Spike didn’t want his Jack diluted and took it neat, thanks. Didn’t want any ice: he’d already had hail. Ice enough, right there.  
  
Spike was drunk and quite contentedly getting drunker. Eventually he’d probably pass out but until that happened, he had a lapful of sleepy, giggly Buffy and that was a bit of all right, and if they decided to do something about it, well, there was the basement and the bed just a short stagger away, since Oz had considerately parked the van right in front of their very own house. Convenient. Not Oz’s house of course, but Oz was all right for a werewolf. Most upstanding werewolf Spike had ever met, which actually meant something.  
  
Spike wasn’t sure precisely what it meant, but there was definitely meaning in it, it tingled along all his nerves, made him feel completely wide awake and lucid, almost like on the other side, and he’d been right: live in the moment, be simply in the body, and love his lady if by the time they got done talking he wasn’t too drunk. Not that by that time she’d know the difference, poor cow. Never had held her liquor at _all_ well, but at least was getting the loose and happy of it, not the suspicious and belligerent, like she mostly did.  
  
The bait had even enticed Rupert from the cooling grill, and Oz had offered the hospitality of a bedroll, if the Watcher chose to accept it. Sitting with the rest of them in the back of the van, Rupert was pretending to savor the Scotch, rather than gulp it right down till the desired effect was achieved and then coast there, the way Spike did, poncy sod.  
  
World must be ending: the git had undone his tie. Not taken his jacket off, though: Oz’s little Sterno heater didn’t crank out enough joules, or btu’s, or however they were measuring that sort of thing now….  
  
Spike had a couple of Oz’s blankets wrapped around Buffy and his clasped arms holding them there, and liquor was anti-freeze, innit? So that was all right. She was all toasty again, not shivering at all.  
  
Leaning back awkwardly and craning his neck, Spike looked out to see if there was a light in Bit’s window, then rubbed his face and damned himself for an idiot because of course there wasn’t. Bit wouldn’t have enjoyed this anyway, he thought, vaguely guilty. Couple of old Brits getting sozzled and talking about the old times, that would have bored her to utter tears. And nobody to snuggle up warm against except maybe Oz, whose eyes seemed to be locked on a different star. So maybe just as well to let her sleep. Felt vaguely bad about it though, he did.  
  
Coming over all maudlin and sentimental. Cure for that was another drink. He latched onto the current bottle and poured another round, but barely a dram for Buffy or she’d rue it. Just enough to keep the buzz going.  
  
Oz was telling them the occasionally interesting history of Quor’toth. How it was the nearest-adjacent place of a whole other universe, somewhere so distant even George Lucas couldn’t have come up with enough _far’s_. But distance didn’t matter so much because space was folded. Rupert nodded solemnly at that, just as if he had the least notion in hell what wolf-boy was talking about. Or maybe he’d only achieved the level of drunk where you nodded solemnly at things.  
  
Anyway, the tale went that sometime in the Middle Ages (“Chivalry times!” put in Buffy wisely, then relapsed to petting and being petted), one Alfonso of Milan had discovered this neat trick. He already knew how to make portals, everybody and his bastard nephew knew how to make portals by then, it was in alchemical scrolls from the Second Dynasty or was that 2nd Century BCE? The fucking Ptolemys, anyway, for God’s sake. The commonist of common knowledge among that era’s Illuminati, anyway. And Our Alfonso found whatever (like his servants, his pets, his assistants, his colleagues, and his ninth wife) he put through one particularly aligned and spelled portal never came back. Either he was an idiot, a truly advanced scientific thinker, a fair-minded man, or just missed wife 9 too much, but he finished up by going through himself and was not heard from further. However, his notes remained, and with the enthusiasm of first discovery, he’d named the realm Quor’toth. Or maybe Kartath. Or maybe….   
  
Medieval Italian was so fucking hard to read. And the spelling of the same word could vary three times in the same fucking sentence. Bless the advent of movable type!  
  
Giles nodded solemn agreement to that, too. They raised their glasses and toasted Herr Gutenberg and movable type.  
  
All chums together, telling tales, each chipping in about whatever piece he had some knowledge of. Or nodding, if that did the job.  
  
So it had naturally got a certain reputation, Quor’toth had (or Kartath, or Cartoth, or…) for being this super place to dispose of things. People. Whatever. According to Oz, some law firm had drawn up a contract for Chicago to dump its toxic waste there, back in the Daley era, and Spike was inclined to believe it. But not New York: New York didn’t play ball, went all haughty, and their people never did lunch with the L.A. people, so the deal never got done.  
  
Then there was this baby….  
  
“Shut up,” Spike said flatly, and was obeyed. Suddenly something approaching sober, or a lot less drunk, Spike checked: breathing, heart rate, smell. It was all right: Buffy was well and truly out, or asleep, or not about to pay any connected attention, anyway. Good enough.  
  
Spike leaned back and shut his eyes for a moment. “Rupert, you breathe a word of any of this, I’ll do for you. Don’t care where you are, how many walls you got between--”  
  
“I do take the general idea, Spike. I’ll be cut into collops and fed to the cat you don’t own. Now do us all the kindness of shutting your pie hole.”  
  
“Just sayin’. Buffy don’t need to know what her true fucking Soul Mate’s got up to--”  
  
Very quietly, Oz asked, “What’s it got to do with Buffy?”  
  
“Nothing, then. Nothing at all.” It was safe to open his eyes and blink then.  
  
Oz waited, puzzled. But if Oz didn’t know, Spike wasn’t about to enlighten him. Didn’t like the way the Watcher was looking at him though--like a bug on a pin. He’d already said too much. Wheels were turning there. Wheels were turning. But at need, he could handle the Watcher, if he had to. Handle Oz, too, if it came to that.  
  
“Spike, I find your game-face distracting and unpleasant. Drop it, please.”  
  
“I look how I want,” Spike responded sullenly, only then realizing he’d changed aspect.  
  
“I’m sure you do. But in the interests of harmony…?”  
  
It took Spike a couple of minutes to calm his demon down, send it back to drowsing. Wasn’t focusing all that well himself, truth be told. Demon, it was specially alert to anything felt as a threat at such times. Not even counting it’d got too fucking independent by half, the last few days. Have to do something about that, some way….  
  
“Anyway,” Oz resumed softly, carefully, “there was this baby. Prophesied as ‘The Destroyer.’ Taken by its guardian into Quor’toth something like a year ago, I forget, to protect him from his enemies. He--”  
  
“It’s a boy, then,” Spike cut in flatly.  
  
“I guess. It seems the Powers are divided over him. Some want him kept until he’s full-grown, can defend himself. Some want him returned, maybe to give the enemies a fair shot. Derail the crisis, whatever future apocalypse he’s supposed to be involved in. Of course, getting him out at all would have to involve the Lady, and there’s been talk a deal has been struck, but the Lady says no, she’s made no binding promises.”  
  
“‘Binding,’” Spike repeated, and this time did feel his eyes turning, could see the small corner lights, that illuminated the rear of the van, seem suddenly brighter. “Minces words real fine, she does. Which side is our Fudo on?”  
  
“The Destroyer will upset the Balance. Fudo likes the Balance the way it is. It’s kind of his job to preserve it. So my best guess is, Fudo wants to keep The Destroyer right where he is, where he can’t affect anything, till he has a long white beard and is fed his supper through a straw. I’m not really sure about that, though,” Oz added apologetically. “The Lady didn’t say anything about Fudo being part of the equation.”  
  
“She wouldn’t. The very skies would fall if she actually _did_ anything,” Spike conjectured bitterly. “Hasn’t even sent me any dreams to get my head screwed around, point me in the right direction. Kept her hands completely clean, she has. Except…she shoved Ethan Rayne into Quor’toth. She must be so fucking pleased with herself!”  
  
“Spike,” said Giles somberly. “You know, or guess, things you aren’t saying, about this. Don’t you.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Will you tell me what they are?”  
  
“No.” Spike let the word hang there, undecorated.  
  
“Will you help…distract, occupy, Fudo whilst I attempt to recover Ethan?”  
  
“It’s the Slayer calls things like that. From where I stand, it’s still none of our concern. Not our apocalypse, here. Maybe never. For me, I’d love to take that thing on. Chop it to mincemeat until all the avatars are used up and there’s nothing more to turn into. Always wanted to take on a samurai…. But it’s the Slayer calls those things. For the both of us. Oz, you tell her your tale. Then, Rupert, you can ask her. An’ then abide her answer. Which is what I’ll do.”  
  
As Spike stirred, beginning to gather Buffy up, Oz said, “One more thing. If you decide to go after Rayne, and if, while you’re there, you come across this baby, The Destroyer, and if you can set up something like a portal, then some arrangement will be made so you can use it. So you can get out. With the baby. And that’s the last of it.”  
  
Spike laughed harshly, trying to figure and manage the logistics of getting Buffy out of the van and home, as drunk as he was. “That’s one thing, is it? Then I’d hate to hear what two would be. You delivered your message, pup. You can run along home now.”  
  
“Well, actually, no. I stay until it’s decided. And if you go, I go with you. The Lady knows what a value you set on your independence. So she won’t do a thing to influence you. Not a single thing. She’s promised.”  
  
“Yeah, fine.” _Except start the whole thing going in the first place,_ Spike thought. _And then do her best to tangle us all up in it. Sure, she’s a fucking model of non-interference._  
  
He was too drunk to think about it any more.  
  
Wolf-boy could put it to Buffy in the morning--as much of it as he knew. Then the Slayer would decide.  
  
**********  
  
Buffy had a headache. Not a force 10, maybe a force 4 (diminishing to 3 after the ibuprofen kicked in). She’d awakened in the big new bed, which didn’t have the same worn-in comfortable hollows as her former bed (now an ex-bed, thanks to Spike) and produced stiff, achy places in her shoulders, back, and neck. At least that was what she blamed them on rather than an awkward sleeping position tucked pillowless under and around Spike, who was leadenly asleep, snoring, and just about immovable when she had to get up to go to the bathroom: up two flights instead of just down the hall.  
  
The shower had apparently been running all night, so there was zero hot water. She turned it off, not even wanting to know what bizarre scenario had resulted in its being left on. She just didn’t want to deal with it.  
  
Despite toothpaste and mouthwash, her mouth tasted as though something small and repulsive had crawled in and died. Her first cup of coffee (instant, in cold water: blech!) got her eyes marginally open, enough to search for yogurt in the dark, powerless, and ominous smelling refrigerator. While she was trying to determine if the yogurt had gone off, Dawn grouched in, complaining how yucky PopTarts tasted unheated and trying to make a case for suing the city for non-delivery of services--at least under Mayor Wilkins’ regime, the power had never gone off.  
  
“You weren’t here then,” Buffy pointed out incautiously.  
  
“But I remember!” Dawn hated to be reminded Buffy had survived all those years without a younger sister to torture her.  
  
Buffy shut her eyes. “Whatever. I don’t want to argue about His Honor, the Giant Snakeness.”  
  
“You started it!”  
  
Without warning, the power snapped on. Everything lit up, popped, hummed, trying to make up for lost time. Buffy and Dawn both jumped. Downstairs, there was a bang, and cursing: Spike had fallen out of bed. Buffy had finished the dubious yogurt before he showed up, stalking through the kitchen to the back porch for his first cigarette of the day, protected by an overcast sky that didn’t show any sign of clearing soon.  
  
Slowly remembering and resuming the rightful order of things, Buffy dumped her horrible cold scummy coffee and set up the coffee maker to brew fresh while Dawn gleefully played with the toaster, making sure it clacked and jumped properly before entrusting fresh pastries to it.  
  
The milk had not survived the hiatus. By the time Buffy had poured all three cartons down the sink, the coffee was ready. Pouring two cups, she slid on the down vest hanging handy behind the outside door and carried the cups outside.  
  
“Ta,” Spike said absently, accepting a cup.  
  
Sipping coffee, Buffy put her back against the rail Spike was leaning on, facing the opposite direction. “It’s a judgment,” she said presently.  
  
“What is, pet.”  
  
“All this.” Gesturing vaguely with her cup, Buffy had the sense she was indicating all the weary, headache-producing, contrary things. “Cosmic payback. Because we had fun.”  
  
That got her a quick, pleased look. “Did, didn’t we?”  
  
“Ahuh.” She nodded heavily. “Universe pays you back for that, though. Not allowed.”  
  
Spike put an arm around her. “Don’t you believe it. Doesn’t work like that.”  
  
“Yes, it does.” Gratefully, she leaned. After awhile, she semi-asked, “Giles is still waiting for an answer.”  
  
“Yeah. An’ dog-boy, he has a little history lesson you sort of slept through. He’ll want to repeat it, I expect.”  
  
“You don’t want to get involved.”  
  
“We’re already involved: I figure Fudo, he served notice. Don’t want to go haring off to Quor’toth, no. Don’t like the odds. Getting back seems real iffish. But you call it, pet. Whatever you decide, I’ll abide.”  
  
“That rhymes,” Buffy noticed.  
  
“Fuck. So it does.”  
  
“Quor’toth, it’s a real place, right? My mystical aura mange not a factor.”  
  
“Seems so. Portal entry, no rifts. But no way back without a major boost. Lady, she says she’ll do that on condition.”  
  
“What condition?”  
  
Spike was silent a long minute. Buffy studied his face--deliberately unrevealing, which itself told her he was trying to keep things locked inside. “Seems there’s a prophecy boy there. Called ‘The Destroyer.’ Seems the Lady wants him fetched back. More’n likely, why she stuffed Rayne there to begin with--to get us into it. On account of Rupert. Sneakier, even, than I’d guessed.”  
  
“The Lady,” Buffy clarified.  
  
“Yeah,” Spike confirmed glumly, finishing his coffee and setting the cup on the rail.  
  
“I haven’t had any signs, dreams, anything like that. You?”  
  
“Nothing. ‘F I had, I’d have said.”  
  
“Would you?”  
  
Another long silence. Finally Spike said, “I got other reasons for wanting no part of this. Sometime, if I have to, I’ll tell you.”  
  
“OK…if the reasons are yours, nothing to do with me. Do they? Have to do with me?”  
  
Spike quirked an uneasy smile, caught. “Maybe. Still my reasons, though. Leave a chap a little privacy.”  
  
“This, from the guy who sleeps naked.”  
  
“Well, yeah. Want a morning shag, less to get all tangled up with. Haven’t heard any complaints, ‘less this is one.”  
  
“No complaints. Except you snore.”  
  
“Do not!”  
  
“Do too! I have witnesses!”  
  
“What witnesses?”  
  
“Well, Dawn. She knows you snore!”  
  
“Hell, Bit will say anything to get a rise. Says you’re an ill-tempered dwarf: does that make it so?”  
  
“She says _what?”_  
  
Spike cut off further discussion with a sudden but lingering kiss, a time-tested way of stopping words altogether. At least an 8 on the hotitude scale. Buffy leaned into it, commenting intelligently, “Mmmmm.”  
  
“Guys?” It was Willow, in fluffy chenille robe and slippers, holding a steaming coffee cup, leaning out the door. Buffy disentangled enough to look around inquiringly. “Phones are working again. Because it rang. It was Angel.” As Buffy moved, Willow said hastily, “He didn’t wait. He said don’t decide anything, don’t do anything. He’s coming. Then he hung up.”  
  
“Shit!” said Spike concisely.


	6. Dire Scenarios

As though the _brrring!_ of the weapons chest phone were a starting gun, Dawn whirled on the stairs. Racing back up to her room, she dove onto her bed, grabbed her cellphone from the bedside table, and hit the #2 speed dial. It rang! The phone was working!  
  
After only twenty rings, she got Mike’s voice slurring, “Ya.”  
  
“Hi! Phones are working again! Severely tremendous!”  
  
If it’d been Spike, she’d have been chewed out for waking him up to pass along such cataclysmic news. But it was Mike. She heard him stirring around for a moment, maybe yawning, changing hands on his phone. She couldn’t imagine it perfectly, she’d never been to his new lair, but she heard the smile in his voice and that was all she really needed. “Dawn. Everything there all right?”  
  
“Now that the power’s back, yeah." Happily, she settled in to chat mode. "You do a sweep last night?”  
  
“Something like.”  
  
“Tell me!”  
  
“Well, nothing much stirring. Saw Spike pass by, ‘bout ninety miles an hour, Slayer at pillion, dunno what that was about, if anything. Everything else all dark. There’s been a lair forming up in Shady Grove, couple of vamps turning everything they could find, about half a dozen fledges. We busted them up, killed most, scattered the rest.”  
  
“Ahuh.” Dawn knew, on a mental map, that particular cemetery was within Mike’s claimed territory. Naturally he was going to roust anything but a lone vamp or two settling in there. “Any losses?”  
  
“Nobody you’d know. Hunted Mercy General afterward. Hospitals, they have generators.”  
  
And would therefore have people out and abroad in something like normal numbers. Dawn understood that too.  
  
Mike didn’t make any big detailed thing out of his hunts, but he didn’t avoid mentioning them, either. Hunting and killing were part of what he was, and although he kept to Dawn’s limits on nights when he came to visit, the rest of the time he attended to vamp priorities and made casually sure she knew it. So she’d appreciate properly what an exception she was, she thought: what allowances he was prepared to make for her. Kind of a compliment, if she wanted to look at it that way.  
  
Some parts of vamp thinking, she could puzzle out pretty well. Some parts, she couldn’t.  
  
She found herself saying, “So how’s Sue?”  
  
“Still here. Not dusted, if that’s what you mean. Sue, she looks out for herself pretty good. May live to a year yet. Didn’t know you had a particular interest in her--”  
  
“I don’t!”  
  
“--to ask after her.” A silence then as he absorbed her protest. “Dawn, why’d you call?”  
  
Dawn shrugged uncomfortably. “I figured it was my turn. Since the phones had been out….”  
  
“No: really.”  
  
Dawn curled up tighter around the phone. “Are you mad at me?”  
  
“What for?” Mike didn’t sound surprised or even puzzled. Only curious.  
  
“I dunno. For anything.”  
  
“For not being Sue, you mean.”  
  
“Maybe. No!”  
  
“You’re like Spike,” Mike commented thoughtfully. “What you don’t want, you still want the ordering of.”  
  
“No! That’s nothing to me, I don’t care about that!”  
  
“And you’re near as terrible a liar,” Mike responded, chuckling.  
  
“I am _not_ lying!” Dawn screeched. It was insupportable that Mike could be so untroubled by what tied her into knots.  
  
“Now, Dawn, don’t you get mad about it when I’m not. You set the limits, not me. And there’s got to be limits. On account of what you are. And I am. No use to complain about that. Just how it is. Always been limits and always will be. Just a matter of where we draw the line. Just ‘cause you ain’t got all of me don’t mean there’s anyone I set higher or think more of. Nobody’s got all of anybody, Dawn…except you take the life that’s theirs and make it all your own. I got no problem with that. Not what I thought you wanted, though….”  
  
“I don’t know what I want!” Dawn wailed.  
  
“Well, I knew that, too. Not impatient about it, though. I got time. How about I swing by this evening, we take a ride. Phone’s all fine, call you anytime I please, and that’s good. But can’t see you. Can’t smell you. Can’t know for certain if your eyes are all sparky or crunched up tight, or if your blood moves calm or fast. Don’t really like the phone all that much, sometimes,” Mike finished, moody and a little wistful.  
  
At least he’d quit being reasonable. She couldn’t stand his being reasonable. Dawn thought she’d feel so much better if he was as confused and miserable as she was.  
  
“Come over,” she agreed, then suddenly realized she had news to impart and sprang upright. “Oz is here! Do you know Oz?’  
  
“Heard Spike speak of him,” Mike responded neutrally. “Werewolf?”  
  
“Ahuh, yes. And Giles, he’s practically camped on the doorstep. He wants us all to go to Quor’toth!”  
  
“What’s that, when it’s at home? Some dimensional thing?” Mike’s tone was way short of pleased.  
  
“Something like that. To rescue Ethan Rayne, of all people! And there’s this thing called Fudo, about eighteen feet high, a kind of Ninja-samurai-demigod thing with a disappearing sword, that doesn’t want us to, and--”  
  
Dawn was amazed to realize the scope and detail of recent developments Mike was ignorant of, that she hadn’t told him about. All kinds of excitement!  
  
As she started to explain about Fudo, and how she’d actually been allowed to sit in on a full-scale Scooby meeting, she noticed Spike standing in her doorway. Breaking off, she tilted her head inquiringly, explaining into the phone, “It’s just Spike.”  
  
Noticed, Spike stalked forward. Batting the phone out of her hand, he seized her wrist and pulled…her out of herself.  
  
Suspended in the pearlescent occluded daylight of a Sunnydale winter morning, Spike was like a fiery cloud. The sparkling motes of his astral body whirled so wildly that he seemed to be flying apart, nearly transparent. Dawn could see through him but not into him. He was exploding like a swarm of hornets.  
  
 _You told,_ he accused.   
  
_Told what? To who?_  
  
 _Angel. About Quor’toth. Second the phone was working, somebody got on to Angel. He’s coming._  
  
Dawn was accustomed to the fury of Spike’s demon. But the demon had been left behind. This implacable rage made Spike seem a stranger to her. It was of the spirit. Of the soul.  
  
He was staring at her ferociously: as though to sift every molecule of her being--here, where the truth of things could not be concealed or evaded. _Know you wanted to. Tried to get me to say you could._  
  
 _It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! Anyway, you’re the one who told me, Spike. If it’s this gigantic dire secret, why did you tell me about it in the first place?_  
  
Spike’s attention left her, turning inward. The seething energy lurched and swayed, no longer locked on target. Dawn could no longer see his eyes. _Hadn’t thought it through, then. What it would mean…._  
  
 _Well, I didn’t!_ Dawn was talking to herself: Spike’s presence had winked out.  
  
In that instant, she was certain that she and Spike were thinking exactly the same thing: If she hadn’t told, who had?  
  
He’d taken his explosion elsewhere.  
  
**********  
  
Descending the stairs an abstracted amble, Spike was thinking, _If not Bit, then who?_  
  
Oz and Giles were in the hall, talking with Buffy and Willow. Noticing him first, Buffy glanced around and Giles looked up too, with a smug, sly something in his eyes and about his pursed mouth. Spike went for him in a flying dive.  
  
The next thing he knew, he was on his back with Buffy kneeling grimly astraddle his chest and Oz weighing down his ankles. Buffy smelled scared and furious; wolf-boy smelled anxious and determined: like he might tear Spike’s throat out but he wouldn’t like it. From behind, Willow’s voice commented, “You got to stop doing this, Spike. It’s rotten for morale, and it’s hard on me. I have better things to do with my spells than slap you down, every few days.”  
  
Giles’ face came hazily into Spike’s view. From the floor, Giles looked as tall as Fudo. With a haughty chin lift, Giles said, “I remained within the letter of your prohibition. I recall nothing said about not communicating with Angel.”  
  
The Watcher’s hairsplitting didn’t touch Spike’s sense of betrayal. Spike was ready to go for him again as soon as Buffy let him up. Must have showed: Giles backed off, past where Spike could see, and Buffy whapped Spike and made him look at her. “You don’t _do_ that! Not to our friends!” Then she lifted her aggrieved face to Giles. “Not that I’m real pleased, either, Giles. Why bring Angel into it?”  
  
“Now that it’s certain the Powers are involved, at least consulting him is an obvious course of action since he’s dealt with them far longer than any of us,” Giles replied, not fazed by Buffy’s displeasure either. “There is also…the problem of how to deal with Fudo. Angel may have some useful insights about that.”  
  
“We don’t need him, pet,” Spike told Buffy urgently. “He’ll only take over the doings, you know he will, want everything his way--”  
  
“Unlike you,” Giles mentioned with reserved sarcasm, and Buffy alternated her glare between them. Then she glanced at Willow and calmed, as though that had settled something for her.  
  
She said, “Unless Angel’s willing to put himself through the blanket-in-the-trunk routine, he can’t start before nightfall. So maybe he’s still at the Hyperion and there’s time to head him off.” Buffy warily let him get to his feet. Hands on her hips, she demanded, “Can I trust you out of my sight for two minutes without your going all Taz on somebody? Do I have to have Willow disinvite you too, until you can quit behaving…well, like some insane-o fledge?”  
  
Spike jerked a glance at the bright panels flanking the front door. “It’s daylight out, love.”  
  
“And we have a handy dandy tunnel that’ll take you right into the nice, dark sewers,” Buffy retorted, unimpressed. “Where you can stay until you’ve convinced me you can behave. I’m not putting up with this, Spike--you blowing up in a vamp tantrum every time something doesn’t suit you, doesn’t go your way. You know better! If this is what playing on the astral side does to you, I don’t think you should go there anymore. Well?”  
  
Presented with an excuse, Spike took it. Bending to put a quick, contrite (he hoped) kiss on Buffy’s forehead, Spike said, “Sorry, love. Maybe you’re right. ‘F the Watcher lets me alone, I’ll let him alone.”  
  
“That would sound a lot better,” Buffy said tartly, “if your eyes weren’t yellow.”  
  
“Oh.” Spike concentrated, shut the demon deeper within him. That took some effort. Seemed it was always simmering close to the surface now, taking any opportunity to flash out at somebody. Good thing he’d thought to take Bit across, accuse her there. Otherwise, he might have flashed out at her, and even he found that unacceptable. Had to get a better grip on himself, some way, to have any chance of steering the rolling disaster he felt already in motion, carrying him along toward several dire outcomes. They all couldn’t happen; but deflect it from one, another worse one opened.  
  
Things were getting past him, and he didn’t know what to do about it, and the combination was driving him frantic.  
  
Which didn’t stop him putting on a smooth, non-twitchy mask for Buffy. Wasn’t hard: she seldom looked past the surface. “There. That better?”  
  
“No fighting,” Buffy decreed flatly, poking a finger into his breastbone for emphasis. “Especially, no escalation. If Giles goes all toplofty on you, that’s not your cue to try to rip out his ribs. We’re out of your jurisdiction, Spike: we’re not your crew, that you can pound on anytime you feel like it. And that goes for you and Angel, too…if I can’t stop him.” Worriedly, Buffy headed into the front room and sat on the weapons chest, picking up the phone there.  
  
Spike and Giles exchanged a bland look--smug on Giles’ side, evaluating on Spike’s. No news to him, that nobody paid much heed to his word here. Which didn’t mean he’d allow outright betrayal without payback. But that would have to wait. Buffy was right on the edge of tossing him out and Spike couldn’t let that happen. Had to be here to keep things contained…including himself.  
  
None of his usual ways of settling himself down--brawling, drinking, fucking--seemed on the current menu, unless Buffy would be willing to combine the first and last. Not likely, he thought, watching her talk into the phone. No joy there, evidently: Angel was en route, couldn’t be recalled. Depending on when he’d set out, another hour, maybe, given that Angel hadn't yet been introduced to the benefits of the necro-tempered glass Oz's van was fitted out with and Spike had added afterward to the house repairs, rendering Casa Summers vamp-safe, too. That meant Spike had to keep good watch and be quick off the mark when Angel showed up. So no drinking either, not that there were enough drinkables in the house to produce more than a mild buzz….  
  
He considered Oz a moment, then waved him nearer, into a close conversational huddle near the front door, throwing a congenial, coercive arm over wolf-boy’s shoulders. “Well stocked up with liquor, are you?”  
  
Oz regarded him quizzically. “Some,” he allowed.  
  
“Fetch it in. Gonna need it, I think.”  
  
That set going, Spike trailed after wolf-boy as far as the front porch and lit a cigarette there, blinking against the brightness. Still clouded over, though: should be all right. Too bright for his demon’s comfort, not bright enough for the rest of him, that yearned after the clarity and brilliance of astral sight, wanted to kick free and soar into it, leave all the itchy muddle of halfway things behind. But he wasn’t gonna do that. Not while he was smoking.  
  
Buffy was right: he shouldn’t be doing so much of that. All disrupted, dim, and edgy when he returned, even if he hadn’t been gone but a minute or two. Took him an hour or more to get himself cogged back into the everyday. Couldn’t afford that now. Had to keep good track of things.  
  
Watching Oz trek to his van and return after a few minutes, toting a plastic milk crate clinking with bottles, Spike made his own fidgety circuit of the porch, lighting a fresh cig from the stub of the last and concentrating on that to hold himself in place.  
  
Coming out of the house, Oz commented helpfully, “You should try meditating.” Spike snarled. Turning, descending the steps backward, Oz said, “No, really,” all earnest but with a glint in his eye. As Spike feinted at him, he skipped briskly into the diffuse sunlight, showing a tight, tucked grin, eyes downcast, as he wheeled around to return to the van.  
  
Cheeky bastard.  
  
Willow and Buffy came out, talking, Buffy predictably hugging herself against the outdoors chill and looking glum. She looked around to tell Spike what he already knew: Angel was in transit.  
  
Spike drew hard on the cigarette. “Figured. However, house is all fresh-spelled, and he wasn’t included in the new invite: don’t have to let him in, you know.”  
  
“I know,” Buffy responded unhappily. “I’ve been thinking about it. But I don’t know…if I could look him in the face and tell him he can’t come in.”  
  
“Never bothered you none with me,” Spike responded, indignant.  
  
“That’s different.”  
  
“Different how?”  
  
Coming a step nearer, Buffy wrapped arms around his neck, pulling his head down into a consoling kiss. Easing away, looking into his eyes, she said, “He was less persistent. He’d just go off and sulk. You’d look all astonished and hurt and then try to yell the house down.”  
  
“Did, a time or two.” Recalling, smiling a little, Spike leaned and kissed her fast before she could get away. “Always caved and let me in eventually, though.”  
  
Smiling in reply, but her eyes shadowed and sober, Buffy said, “Spike, you can always come in. Sort of a permanent invitation. When you’re not going all demento on people we really, really don’t want to hurt, anyway.”  
  
“He ain’t seen the half of what he’s got coming,” Spike grumbled.  
  
Buffy didn’t seem quite so pissed-off at him as he’d expected. He wondered about the logistics of sneaking in a quick shag while they waited. Settle him down right nice, that would. And her, too, she was all on edge….  
  
But no. Get lost in it, they always did, and miss the one moment before things went totally to hell.  
  
Affecting casualness, he asked Willow, “Red, anybody ever just leave and set up shop there for good an’ all, there on the astral side?”  
  
“Sure,” Willow replied cheerfully. “We call them ‘ghosts.’”  
  
“Ta, ever so,” Spike said sourly. As bad as wolf-boy, he thought: sick of people _glinting_ at him, like he was the straight man to their comedy act.  
  
As he swung into another restless circuit of the porch, his back to them, Willow called, “No, really! We’re grounded in the physical, Spike. Even you. Though that _seems_ real, this is what _is_ real. Cut off from it, we’d wither and die.”  
  
A laugh and a half, that the witch thought she needed to instruct a vamp on relating to the tangible, living in the goddam moment.  
  
As he reached the far end of the porch and turned, there was Buffy right in front of him. “What’s got you so wound up about this?” she wanted to know.  
  
Spike flung his arms in frustration. “Always disrupts things, doesn’t he? Everything’s got to be his way, his agenda. And you can’t even make up your mind to leave him shut out on the porch thirty seconds.”  
  
Buffy’s face heated. “This time, I’ll back you up,” she promised.  
  
“Fine--you do that. A little less eagerness would be nice. Go inside, dither there, why don’t you?”  
  
Buffy folded her arms. “Because I’m not real keen on a brawl on my front porch!”  
  
“Not gonna hit him, pet, ‘less he hits me first. And I expect he’ll be on his best manners: he wants something from us. And he might have the teaspoon of brains required to know starting something in a confined space, in daylight, would be stupid with a side of suicidal. Not that I haven’t known him to do stupider.” Spike rocked on his heels, happily contemplating for a moment the fact that these days, if the both of them toppled into the yard, Angel would singe a whole lot faster than Spike would.  
  
“I don’t trust that look. We’ll all go inside,” Buffy decided.  
  
When Spike guilelessly displayed the cigarette, his justification for being on the porch, Buffy started back toward the door, declaring over her shoulder, “There better not be fighting! I’m holding you responsible!”  
  
“Don’t you always? I’m to blame for winter, and taxes, and global warming. Price of fish?” he called after her as she and Willow vacated the porch and slammed the door behind them.  
  
So that was sorted. Nothing more to do except wait, smoke, and try not to go off his head.  
  
About four cigarettes later, a big black Mercury sedan pulled up nose to nose with wolf-boy’s van. For a mercy, not the convertible, considering Angel himself was driving. Must really be desperate, risking that the overcast would hold.  
  
The Merc’s purring engine cut off. Then Angel was barreling up the walk, a loud checkered blanket over his head and clutched together in front, already fuming as he took the steps in one hop and hit the porch. Angel dumped the blanket with a scowl, then checked at finding Spike before him, blocking his way.  
  
“All she knows,” Spike said urgently, “is that he’s called ‘The Destroyer.’”  
  
The Immense Forehead creased, taking that in. Then it smoothed in what Spike hoped was relief.  
  
“Right,” Angel said, pushing past to the door. Almost, he knocked. Then his hand moved aside to touch the bell: not wanting to test his welcome. Not wanting to know.  
  
Before the door opened, Spike heard Buffy’s voice, inside, saying, “Angel. Come in.”  
  
Pitching the cigarette, Spike stalked in grimly behind. He’d done his bit. Now it would all have to go how it went.  
  
*********  
  
There were sides, Dawn noticed. And the sides were weird: Angel and Spike against everybody.  
  
Angel, sitting in Spike’s corner chair with no objection from Spike, had his head bent most of the time, uncharacteristically subdued, working his hands together like he didn’t know what else to do with them or he’d really like to have them around somebody’s windpipe but couldn’t because that would spoil all the brittle Yay team togetherness. Except when Oz, or Giles, mentioned anything about the kid, “The Destroyer.” Then he’d shoot a quick look at Spike; and Spike, all bland and blank, sitting nearly opposite on the floor by the couch, next to Buffy’s knees, wouldn’t let on he’d noticed but there’d be a hint of an encouraging nod not visibly aimed at anyone in particular, and Angel would settle back to his anxious glower.  
  
They were back-stopping each other, which was uber-weird.  
  
And then the penny dropped: they were both doing whatever gyrations were necessary to not admit the baby was Angel’s.  
  
After Oz and Giles recapped the difficulties of getting out of Quor’toth, once you’d got in, Angel nodded heavily, volunteering somberly, “That’s what I was told. That the Powers wouldn’t help because the Balance was at issue, and I’d be disrupting it. I thought about it, but then you called,” (he shot one of those quick, guarded looks at Buffy) “and that seemed to take priority.” He turned a hand in explanation. “So I came.”  
  
That would have been about six months back: early summer, when all the SITs had still been here and the opposition had been Bringers, Turok-han, and the First; when Angel had been called in to organize things with his typical iron hand. When Spike had submitted to that brutal vamp ritual, the Supplice d’Allégance, to settle old scores once and for all; when he’d first told Dawn about the baby.  
  
Leaning forward, probably not noticing her hand had landed on Spike’s shoulder (but Spike noticed, pulling a tight, private smile not visibly aimed at anybody, either), Buffy asked Angel, “Why didn’t you say anything about it?”  
  
It was almost funny, watching both vampires go tense and cautious, and Dawn the only one watching them hard enough to notice. “It was a case,” Angel said, checking every few seconds to see if Buffy was buying it, checking with his coach if he was getting it right. “A…ah, kidnapping. There’s a prophecy. A couple, actually. A lot of different sides involved. I was, we were, acting on behalf…of the family. It was a case, Buffy,” Angel said, strangling one hand with the other even harder. “And already dead-ended. You had your own apocalypse you were dealing with. And since I went to L.A., it’s not as if we’ve been exactly communicating. I didn’t think…you’d be interested.”  
  
“The Balance,” Giles commented aridly, from the far end of the couch. “That’s what has got us Fudo’s attention, apparently. Is it possible to separate these two issues? The child, and Ethan?”  
  
Leaning against the door arch, Oz replied, “Seems not. Per the Lady, no ticket out without him. She won’t help, though. Except for that.”  
  
“Won’t get her hands dirty,” Spike observed bitterly. “That’s what she has her damn ‘instruments’ for. I say, leave the whole thing where it is and the hell with the bunch of ‘em.”  
  
“I can’t do that, Spike,” said Giles, folding his hands. “It’s on my account, or at least because of my negligence, that things came to the pass that they did. It never for a moment occurred to me that those Initiative louts could hold Ethan for a score of hours, let alone three years. If I had known…. If I’d been less certain…. Well, it was my fault, you see.”  
  
“Come off it, Watcher: you didn’t make him cut Bit. Or treat me to a non-stop porn show in my head. Or suck up to Digger, take his shilling to open the goddam Hellmouth. He made his own choices. Let him take the consequences.”  
  
“Nevertheless,” said Giles. “Then, I did what was necessary. Now, knowing, I cannot consign him to-- Excuse me.” Abruptly, Giles got up and left the room.  
  
“Sweet on the bugger,” Spike muttered, and Buffy whapped him. He twisted around to look at her indignantly. “Well, he _is!_ Doesn’t make them less a pair of old ponces to hit me for saying so!”  
  
Willow noisily cleared her throat. “Back to the matter at hand,” she suggested, brandishing a notebook. “I’ve made a decision tree here. There’s no point wrangling over the details if we’re rejecting the thing as a whole. What are the pros, and what are the cons? What do we need, and need to know, to come to a decision about this?” She looked around the room alertly, awaiting an answer she could write down.  
  
Dawn figured it was gonna be about like a conference of mice over who was gonna bell the cat. Unfolding, she went after Giles but was distracted by the ringtone of her cellphone, upstairs. Sprinting to her bedroom, she found the little ruby phone languishing in an open drawer: at least Spike hadn’t broken it.  
  
Flipping it open to the accompaniment of its built-in Star Trek communicator chirp, Dawn said, “Yes?”  
  
“Me,” said Mike’s voice, pitched to a growl. “Downstairs. Best open the door if you don’t want it down.”  
  
 _Oops._ Another constituency wanting to weigh in on the issue.  
  
Folding the phone and sticking it in a pocket as she hustled down the stairs, Dawn debated which she should tell--Buffy or Spike.  
  
**********  
  
Mike knew there’d be no point pissing off the Slayer: she’d dust him as soon as look at him, except for deferring to Spike and generally Dawn. That was all right: he had no particular use for her neither. Standing in the upper doorway, that Dawn had nervously escorted him to along the tunnel, Mike told the Slayer, “Got no dispute with you: you look after her fairly well, mostly. It’s Spike hauls her into things, puts her at risk. Guess it’s Spike I have to talk to, then, about this damn Quor’toth nonsense.”  
  
At his shoulder, not having decided between standing by him and ducking behind the Slayer, Dawn piped up, “But it’s Spike who’s against going. And it’s Buffy who’s at least halfway inclined to say we’ll go.”  
  
Mike frowned, puzzling out that unexpected alignment. Then he looked around at Dawn. “And you: what are you inclined to?”  
  
She fluttered her hands, pleased. “You’re asking _me?_ Nobody asks me what I want!”  
  
“Do you want to get into this thing, or not?” Mike asked patiently. Sometime, she was gonna have to come down on something, the one side or the other, and have no excuses afterward how things turned out.  
  
“It would depend,” Dawn formulated slowly, “on who’s going. If it’s everybody, I wouldn’t want to be left here all alone.”  
  
It was as good as a backhand slap, that she considered his company as being alone. But he let it pass, waiting for her to have her say.  
  
“But if it’s just Buffy and a few others…. No, Spike would never stay behind, not when there’s a chance we couldn’t get back. And I have the feeling Angel’s going, regardless. And Giles…. So I guess it depends on what Buffy decides.”  
  
 _We couldn’t get back._ That phrase, said so casually, struck Mike with an unaccustomed chill. Or maybe it was finding that his true sire, that bastard Angel, was apparently mixed up in it.  
  
“That’s not up for discussion,” Buffy put in abruptly. “No matter who goes, or doesn’t, you’re staying. This isn’t gonna be some picnic on a beach, Dawn. Nobody knows what’s there, so we’d have to be prepared for just about anything. A seventeen-year-old girl is not basic combat equipment.”  
  
“Oh,” said Dawn, deflated, relieved, and worried. “But then who…who would take care of me?”  
  
“Willow, probably. Since there’s no magic there, we’d be in no pressing need of a witch.”  
  
“I’m not staying with Willow! I don’t even _like_ Willow that much, most days, except when she makes the funny shapes pancakes, like Tara used to. I won’t, and you can’t make me!”  
  
This wasn’t going anyplace. Rearing back a little, Mike shouted, “Spike!” The basement walls and ceiling were covered now with those soundproofing waffle squares, but the upstairs door was open and Mike was confident any vamp would hear him regardless.  
  
Spike came quick to the doorway, found no mayhem in progress, and ambled halfway down the stairs, taking a seat there. “Need rescuing, do you?”  
  
Mike was reevaluating, too. Maybe it hadn’t been more than a mishap with the phone, that had cut his conversation with Dawn off so suddenly. Certainly Dawn seemed none the worse for it. And Spike seemed easy and casual--not as though he’d done something Mike could rightly call him on. “This notion of dimension-hopping,” he said to Spike, across the Slayer. “However it goes, it’s gonna affect me. If you just take off for any long while, vamps roundabout will figure the lid’s off and anything is fair game.”  
  
Spike plowed both hands through his hair, then told the Slayer, “He’s right. Hadn’t thought about that end of it.”  
  
The Slayer looked vexed. “And we just got it settled down, too. Why do there have to be all these complications!”  
  
“On account of the Balance, I expect,” Spike remarked thoughtfully, watching her. “If we get into this, the Balance goes to hell. Starting here, seems like. Another reason--”  
  
“Don’t say it!” Buffy warned.  
  
Spike sighed and shut his eyes. “I don’t even know what the fucking Balance is, pet, except that Fudo doesn’t like it messed with. And we don’t yet have any counter to Fudo, now do we?”  
  
“We’ll improvise!” Buffy declared, chin stubbornly lifted.  
  
“Yeah, because that always works so well. Love, if you want, I’ll go, do what I can, and you stay here with Bit and--”  
  
“No! Not if-- Not if there’s a chance…you couldn’t get back.”  
  
“Love, there’s always that chance. One way or the other. But you haven’t got rid of me yet--”  
  
“Hello!” Dawn interjected loudly. “Nobody’s listening to me! I’m not staying with Willow, and you’re both being severely dumb here! Spike, who thinks the whole thing is a mistake, is volunteering, and Buffy, who’s all about the team, is figuring how to desert her sister. What’s wrong with this picture?”  
  
The witch, Willow, came down a few steps. “Are you guys gonna come back so we can work on the decision tree?”  
  
Arms rigid and hands fisted at her sides, Dawn took no notice, glaring first at Buffy, then at Spike. “Spike, if you go, I better be with you, you better make sure that I am. Otherwise, I’ll _tell!”_  
  
“Fuck!” Spike came down in a blur of fast. Suddenly still, he held out a hand. Looking mulish, Dawn slapped hers into it…and her smell changed, and they collapsed, linked, to the floor.  
  
When Mike pulled in a startled breath and started to kneel, Buffy pushed him back upright, saying wearily, “It’s all right: they’re just off again. Their new stupid trick, very boring for onlookers.” Walking obliviously around the two bodies toward the stairs, she added, “You might as well come up--everybody else has. Get the vamp quotient right. I guess that’s important, to have a minimum of two vampires snarking and posturing at each other. Otherwise, how could anything be decided?”  
  
Slowly kneeling, determining that Dawn was still breathing and pumping her blood around but her smell strange, like sleeping, Mike responded absently, “I’ll wait.”  
  
Buffy turned at the bottom of the stairs. “Mike, I don’t want to make a thing about this, but I want you where I can see you. Or else gone. Your pick.”  
  
Thoroughly unnerved and bewildered, Mike obeyed the Slayer’s summons. With several backward glances at the sprawled pair on the basement floor, he followed her up the stairs.  
  
**********  
  
Materializing in the occluded privacy of the middle air, Dawn immediately rounded on Spike, demanding, _Why shouldn’t I? Why should I give up what gives me some leverage here? I won’t be left behind, Spike. I won’t! Anyway, who the hell cares if Angel’s got a kid?_  
  
 _Buffy would. Bit, turn one minute from what you think, what you want, and consider. The child we’re s’posed to fetch, the child in Quor’toth, is Angel’s son. Out of Herself, Queen Darla: his Sire. Which shouldn’t even be possible, but I guess it’s something was granted him. As the Champion. And how will that seem to Buffy? That what turned him to Angelus, with her, was blessed with a child with someone else. I can’t even imagine how bad that will hurt her. Like it’s some wrong in her, that prevented it, that made it go bad._  
  
In this place, it was impossible to see or hear the truth and doubt it. And it wasn’t some hypothetical Buffy with her, hurting and frantic to convince her, but an actual (if shimmering and insubstantial) Spike. They were both about the same size this time, and the last time, too, Dawn noted with satisfaction.  
  
 _That’s stupid! Why should she care what Angel does?_  
  
 _Maybe she shouldn’t. But she does. Angel knows it, too, how it would hit her. Why he’s kept all mum about it. She’d take it personally, Bit; and take it to heart. Make her feel lower than dirt. Maybe can’t keep it from her forever, but right now, if she knew, it would force her decision. She’d throw herself into this like she throws herself into everything: full tilt, straight ahead, blind to all else. To make it up to Angel that she couldn’t be the one to kindle with a child for him. And instead produced a right monster, Angelus, loose in the world again, so she had to slam a sword through him, send him to hell. She’s not forgot, Bit. She’d be hell-bent to present Angel with a goddam child, even if it wasn’t hers._  
  
 _All maybes and supposes,_ Dawn challenged.  
  
 _Bit, you don’t understand. Just don’t understand…._ He was quiet a moment, thinking. Then he said, _You might think a vamp wouldn’t care, neither. But I’ve seen Dru with her dolls. How she fed on children when we could find them. Liked the notion of a child inside of her—it took her like that. An’ then get all wound up to realize they were all dead. Cry sometimes for days…. Then there’d be a round of punishing her dolls. And me, like as not. And like that, for awhile. And then it would all begin again…._  
  
Neither “Eew! Ick!” nor “That’s insane!” seemed an adequate response. And she didn’t think that Spike would understand “TMI,” even yet.  
  
In this place, censors were off. Though it pained him, too, he was saying what he knew and what he believed. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked….  
  
Although it was ugly, and twisted her up inside to hear and partly imagine Drusilla’s warped and deadly child hunger, even more intolerable was for Spike to think Dawn a child, unable to understand grown-up things.  
  
She’d never felt blood-thirst or the compulsion to hunt and hurt, but she could imagine and assign them their fair weight, for a vamp. She knew about the seething intensities of sex by the battered walls and broken furniture left in their wake. She could _so_ know things!  
  
 _OK, that’s Dru, crazy enough to think women get pregnant by eating babies. That’s not Buffy!_  
  
 _Buffy’s given up,_ Spike responded simply. _Slayers don’t last. Don’t get to have families of their own, children. In that way, if no other, vamps are safe. She had human lovers, a few, and dumped them when she saw there wasn’t no future in it. For her or them, neither one. Part of why she turned to me, I expect. Like Dru, punishing her dolls for what she couldn’t have. S’not like that now…but we had bad spells, too, there for awhile…. Part of why she don’t necessarily treat you all that well but still holds onto you like grim death. ‘Cause you’re as near to a child as she’ll ever have. But what if she found that wasn’t so? That what she’d given up on was possible, after all. Wouldn’t she go for it like she goes for everything? And is it likely, now, Angel would turn her away or refuse her? Once she knows, won’t be long before she kicks me to the curb. ‘Cause I got none of that miracle spunk in me. Can’t do that, give her that. ‘Cause I ain’t yet suffered enough, or done right by the soul once I had it, or some other damn thing. Dunno, just how it is. Won’t make me give her up, though. Not till she tells me…I’m not fit for her no more. Not enough for her…. Not without a fight!_  
  
It was good they were something like their actual sizes because it let Dawn hug him close, or try to, anyway. It was like trying to hug smoke. The surfaces never quite connected. But it was the thought that counted, right? _You’re just being all insane-o insecure. If it was a miracle, it was probably a one-off, never to be repeated. A prophecy child, after all—not anything normal. And anyway, Buffy doesn’t care about that! She’s said so, over and over.  
  
Yeah: over and over. ‘F she didn’t say it so much, I might believe her better. Wish she’d leave off about it, actually.  
  
Sometimes, Buffy isn’t too bright about some things. I think she was worried you were worried about it, which makes you worry about it even if you didn’t before, so she tells you again, and around and around. Spike, I think you’re making this whole thing up in your head. Because it’s Angel, who has this nasty habit of taking what’s yours. Or trying to. But on the chance you’re not, and because it’s something you’ve managed to tie yourself up in knots about, when Buffy finds out, it won’t be from me. I promise._ Dawn could feel the relief pouring off him, like the sweat of a fever breaking. _However, in return, I want you to promise that if you go into Quor’toth, I go, too. You have to: we’re connected.  
  
All right, Bit. The way things are piling on, don’t think there’s much chance to dodge it now, for all my trying. May have to smuggle you across in the baggage, but I’ll manage, some way. I’d miss you something terrible, that’s true, though you’re a bitch brat more’n half the time and I don’t know why I put up with you.  
  
Because you love me,_ Dawn responded smugly, reflecting that one way or the other, her lever had worked, and that was all she cared about. _Come on: let’s get back. We’re probably all gross, laying on the basement floor. Mike probably freaked. He doesn’t know about any of this!_  
  
As she bounced to her feet and brushed herself off briskly, watching Spike stir and start looking dimly around the basement, it occurred to Dawn that extorting a promise that she could go meant leaving Mike behind—maybe forever. She stifled the pang that gave her by reflecting he’d have Sue to console him. The way vamps focused on the present moment, without much by the way of regrets or expectations, likely he wouldn’t even miss her all that much. She’d been here; now she wasn’t, not even a smell to remember her by; too bad, big deal.  
  
“Bit? What’s wrong?”  
  
“Nothing! Absolutely fricking nothing!” Suddenly in a foul mood, she charged up the stairs.  
  
**********  
  
Well, it’d all gone straight to hell, just as Spike had expected. Climbing the stairs to the first floor hall, Spike found it dark outside. In only a few subjective minutes, hours had passed, and apparently the decision tree was no longer an issue. All the signs said the decision had been made: everybody scattered to different tasks, research mode. The Watcher slumped unconscious on the couch, glasses laid aside, so not likely napping. Most likely, gone astral to natter with his fuck pal Rayne, learn about the doings over there: what passed for reconnaissance. Buffy and Angel head to head in the front room, seemingly discussing weaponry. Bit and Mike passing by, Bit going on twenty to the dozen about Fudo, Mike with head bent, listening but giving nothing away, as they went out onto the front porch. Didn’t see wolf-boy, maybe gone out to the van for something.  
  
“Spike! You put porn on my computer!”  
  
In the den, Willow was half rising from a chair to berate him, eyes wide and face flushed.  
  
“Yeah. So?”  
  
“So my e-mail in-box is now all full of offers how I can enhance my ‘male equipment!’”  
  
Spike shrugged, trying to overcome the sense of being overwhelmed, scattered, everything coming at him at once. “Wasn’t but a few bookmarks, favorites. Didn’t actually _keep_ anything.”  
  
“You’ve polluted my laptop! Do you have any idea how hard it is to clean out the cookies those sites set? Cookies: yech! And once you get on some pervert’s list, you can never get off! I’m gonna have to change my e-mail and everything! Maybe wipe the whole hard drive!”  
  
Only the last part of that registered. And the witch’s furious indignation, of course, that didn’t concern him--not over a little porn. Besides, done was done. Sliding between the table and the wall, Spike took Willow’s place before the laptop and started hitting keys with two fingers. “Don’t wipe nothing, I have all sorts of notes here that I need.” Reaching for his glasses, he further displaced her, oblivious to her indignant squawks.  
  
Her remark about ghosts, on the porch, had set him thinking about something he’d read in the Watchers’ archives he’d been browsing through for months, lately with special attention to all matters dimensional. Hadn’t much noted it at the time, didn’t seem much use to it; but it’d been about some bloke who claimed to have ended a haunting by unconventional means—with a weapon. A sword, or something like, that could cleave the immaterial.  
  
He was still searching when he heard Dawn squeal outside, and a big, unpleasantly familiar voice bellow, “So you haven’t chosen the path of wisdom. Who opposes me? Who is your champion, Slayer? Or will you face me yourself?”  
  
Fudo. Damn.


	7. Convergences

If it’d been daylight, Dawn thought, she could have kept him from it. He would at least have hesitated, and she could have got in front and shoved, and given him what-for (that was something he said, “what-for”: vague and dire), anyway done freaking _something!_ But it was full winter dark, and there was no hesitation at all. No gap in which she could have inserted herself.  
  
As Fudo appeared on the walk and blared his challenge, Mike attacked: over the rail and at him, vamp fast, vamp heedless. For a second, he and Fudo were almost in proportion--the top of Mike’s head about level with Fudo’s chest. Then Mike leaped for a throat that was no longer in reach, and was trying to bite a kneecap, then an ankle. Stance widening, Fudo extended upward beyond water tower height. He would have been a hazard to low-flying planes. Down from that height sprang a sword of blue lightnings, crackling as it came. Effortlessly it clove Mike at an angle--from the join of neck to shoulder at the left, straight through and down to the point of the right hip. His body slid wetly apart.  
  
Dawn didn’t know how she came to be standing on the grass or what she meant to do as the sword started down a second time. She just flung her head back and yelled as loud as she could, “Stop! He’s mine!”  
  
At once, a Fudo-shaped adult stood before her, empty handed: much broader but only a little taller than she, frowning at her perplexedly. His eyes shone like moonstones in his indigo countenance. His mismatched tusks, one up, one down, were also bright as he asked, “You claim this one?”  
  
“I claim them all!” Dawn declared, with no idea what claiming entailed but grabbing what felt like an opportunity. “They’re all mine, all in this household.”  
  
“Then you should have warned me,” said Fudo gravely. “You said you wouldn’t interfere.”  
  
“I interfere. Because they’re mine. Fix him!”  
  
“I was attempting to do that when you interrupted.”  
  
“No: _fix_ him! Make him like he was!”  
  
“I cannot restore untruth. The blow falls where the fault lies. Each must fix himself. Or herself,” Fudo added, all PC, with a nod of a bow to her.  
  
That was when Spike, Buffy, and Angel piled out onto the porch--all armed with swords snatched from the weapons chest--and Giles after, with a loaded crossbow. And Oz’s van bumped over the curb and came careening across the lawn into a Fudo…who was simply not there anymore, and Dawn had to leap clear as the van went past and crunched into the steps, rebounding and rocking.  
  
As Dawn picked herself up, they all spilled down from the porch to stand around Mike. Dawn pushed through as Mike reported in a whisper, “I can’t feel my legs.”  
  
“They’re over there.” Spike turned as Willow came around the rear of the van. “Red, what’s to be done?”  
  
Willow did a bit of a take, finding Mike in two distinct and separate parts. Then she waved at the porch. “Get him up there. Inside the wards.”  
  
Forehead creased, Buffy asked, “Should we move him? Won’t we…hurt him?”  
  
“As compared to what?” Willow retorted bluntly, leading the way.  
  
After a second’s hesitation, Spike scooped the upper part; with a grimace, Angel took the lower part. They regathered on the porch, Spike and Angel trying to ease the parts they held into alignment. Willow went inside and turned on the porch light. Shakily exiting the van, Oz came up the steps, standing clear, with Dawn, commenting with quiet puzzlement, “Well, at least he hasn’t dusted yet.”  
  
“Munich?” Spike was asking Angel.  
  
“Maybe. But that was only an arm….” Angel pulled at his blood-soaked sleeves distastefully. “I have to get clean.”  
  
As Angel moved to go inside, Spike grabbed and stopped him, saying, “You’re his _sire!”_  
  
“Oh. That one. You feed him if you want, Spike. You’re elder. That should do as well. He’s gonna bleed out no matter what we do.”  
  
When Angel moved, Spike was there in front of him, blocking the door. “You’re his fucking sire! Nothing else signifies. ‘F you want help with Quor’toth, you _see_ to him!”  
  
“Spike, back off!” It wasn’t a shout, but Spike moved aside as if shoved. So Angel still had it: the power of absolute command gained from the Supplice. When Angel gave a direct command in a certain tone of voice, Spike _had_ to obey; he went yellow-eyed and fangy in reaction.  
  
 _Why wasn’t anybody DOING anything?_ Dawn thought despairingly. If it’d been Spike lying on the porch in two pieces, Buffy wouldn’t be just standing there, she’d--  
  
Dawn saw it then, and did it, ducking between the squabbling vampires to drop onto her knees by Mike’s head. She was afraid to touch him, afraid that the alignment was important and she’d mess it up. His pale eyes had gone vague and didn’t move to notice her. But he moved, taking a breath, whispering in all the voice he had, “Dawn.” His attached arm lifted, fingers stroking her hair where it lay on her shoulder, then fell as the effort exhausted him.  
  
She’d thought all she’d need to do was get close, and vamp instinct would take care of the rest. But the choice was left with her.  
  
Just behind her, Oz’s voice commented, “Damn, vamps are tough.”  
  
“Sometimes they need a little help,” Dawn said without turning. “D’you have a knife?”  
  
“Of course.” Oz offered a red-cased knife with the corkscrew gadget extended. Rattled, he pulled it back and worked out the blade, instead, offering it again.  
  
As Dawn grimly cut a line across her forearm, the thick part just below the elbow, Buffy cried out, “Dawn, _don’t!”_  
  
“You can help next,” Dawn said coolly. “Don’t let him take too much.” Presenting her bleeding arm to Mike’s face, letting the blood fall into his open mouth, Dawn thought what an idiot he was: if he’d just stayed on the porch, within the wards, none of this had to happen. But he was _her_ idiot, and if there was any benefit in Slayer blood, she wanted him to have it.  
  
When Mike’s face changed and the fangs bit deep, she barely winced at all.  
  
**********  
  
Enough bandages to tend an elephant at Casa Summers, so that was no problem. Cold wasn’t a problem either, though warm would have been better….  
  
Sitting back on his heels and dipping his sticky hands in the bowl of cooling water, Spike said to Buffy, “Fetch out the ‘lectric blanket, will you, pet? Can run it off the cord Red’s got in the den there, the one she uses to charge up the computer….”  
  
“It…will get all bloody,” Buffy said from her place by the door--sort of half in, half out. Not wanting to desert in a crisis but not wanting to hover, either.  
  
She’d been plainly relieved when Spike had curtly forbidden her to imitate Dawn, share out her blood. Such things were personal and Spike didn’t share.  
  
He’d let Mike feed off him presently, though. Let him get the good of Dawn’s donation first.  
  
“Then we’ll get another,” he responded patiently. “But it’s not for Michael: s’for Bit.”  
  
“Oh. All right.”  
  
After a few minutes, Buffy opened the den window to feed the cord out. Then she came back onto the porch with her arms full of the blue electric blanket from the broken upstairs bed. While she plugged it in, Spike wrapped it around Dawn’s shivering back, where she sat on the porch by Mike, who was sleeping or something. There was enough left to lay over Mike’s torso, wrapped up in gauze and then yards and yards of ripped bedsheet on top. The sheeting was covered in daisies: looked odd, but helped soak up the mess. The blanket might not get messed up too bad: the blood was no longer coming out faster than it could go in. Surface healing, that always came first. Seal up the skin. Contain the damage.  
  
If nobody got at you in the meantime, while you were down and defenseless….  
  
Sitting, Spike pulled Dawn against his chest and wrapped his arms around, holding the blanket close against her. He could feel it beginning to heat.  
  
“I was hurt as bad, or worse,” he told Dawn quietly, combing fingers through her hair, “after we took on that taskin beastie. All busted up inside. Doubt there was a whole bone left. And wasn’t but a few days, I was up and about again. Mostly thanks to your sis. Slayer blood, that’s a powerful thing. An’ yours as good as hers.”  
  
Still shivering, Dawn stiffly resisted his attempt at reassurance for awhile. Then she said in a wavering voice, “He was cut right in two, Spike!”  
  
“Not worse, only different. Worse to look at, though, I expect. But the demon’s strong, too. And its business is to keep him whole and unchanged from the minute he was taken and turned. Give it enough time, and fuel, and it’ll do its job well enough. He’ll be back to what he was.”  
  
After a few minutes, Dawn leaned back, accepting the comfort. She turned her face in against his shoulder. “He doesn’t even breathe. He’s so dumb, Spike! If he’d just stayed on the porch--”  
  
“Couldn’t do that. Time you think it all out, it’s likely too late. Just throw yourself into it headlong, hope you come out on the other side. I’d likely have done the same.”  
  
“I know. Are you mad…that I let him mark me again?”  
  
“Don’t much like it,” Spike admitted, very conscious of the bandaged mark on her forearm, that signified she’d been taken by another but not devoured, was being saved for later and no interference tolerated. “But s’not up to me anymore, is it? Yours to say, yours to choose. Tisn’t like I’m gonna give him any taste of my Slayer, now am I?”  
  
Dawn chuckled weepily.  
  
Spike continued, “I’ll give him a feed later. When he can take it. And then Angel will--”  
  
“He won’t.”  
  
“He will. I’ll shame him into it. That mostly works. Sometimes…. In a way, it’s family, Bit. And Michael is of his making as surely…as that other.” Spike changed what he’d been going to say: Buffy had come onto the porch.  
  
Bending, Buffy presented a tall glass of orange juice to her sister, who didn’t want to take it. So Spike took and held it.  
  
“My kidneys are afloat!” Dawn protested.  
  
“Drink it,” Buffy directed, still bent, hands on her knees. “You need it. That was more than a pint, and you don’t have that to spare.”  
  
“She’s right, Bit.”  
  
Struggling free of the blanket, Dawn lurched to her feet, swimmy-headed and uncertain as a drunk. Declaring, “I have to pee!” she wavered to the door. Buffy followed along to be sure she made it up the stairs all right. Spike meditatively drank the juice. It tasted slightly off--from the refrigerator being down, most likely.  
  
Since the blanket wasn’t being used, Spike arranged it to let Mike get the good of it. Then, in Dawn’s absence, he lit the cigarette he’d been wanting the past hour.  
  
Presently Buffy returned, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “Can we bring him inside?”  
  
“Wait till morning. When we’ll have to. Set him on a door or something, so as not to bust it all open again. Might clear off the table in the den, lay him out there….”  
  
As Spike tried to think through the logistics, Buffy came and settled behind him, wrapped him around in her arms as he’d wrapped Dawn. “So it’s not a wake, then?” When Spike just shook his head, she went on, “I’m surprised you haven’t gone all astral.”  
  
“Wanted to,” Spike admitted. “No use here. An’ I don’t want that Fudo to get the notion we’re scared of him. Even if I got no answer to him yet, no blade that will cut him….”  
  
“But you didn’t. Sometimes, you’re not entirely stupid.”  
  
“Thought maybe Bit…might need something.”  
  
“That, too. She was out on her feet. I put her to bed.”  
  
“Good. Be a week, anyway, before she can stand to give any more.”  
  
After a little while, Buffy mentioned hesitantly, “I could draw some. In a cup?”  
  
“No. We’ll do for him. Me and Angel. No need of that.”  
  
Buffy shrugged. “You don’t have to get like that. It’s not as if I offered to sleep with him!”  
  
“Fancy him, do you?”  
  
“Not anymore,” Buffy said, so Spike figured they were no longer talking about Mike. Rising, she tugged at him. “Come on. The wake can spare you for five minutes. I have two words for you: hot water. With extras.”  
  
“That’s four words. And…he wants watching.”  
  
“The wards--”  
  
Spike shook his head, uneasy at the thought of leaving Mike laid out on the porch alone, wards or not. Extras or not. Though that was a pull too: stronger than the constant temptation of astral freedom and clarity.  
  
Making a vexed noise, Buffy abandoned him and went inside. Spike sighed and settled, lighting another cigarette.  
  
He was surprised when Angel came out and walked slowly to the glider. “I’ll take a shift.” They traded looks as Angel dropped onto the glider and pushed it to swinging. “I know what to do,” Angel said, irritated, as though Spike had openly doubted his ability or his intentions. “It isn’t like it’s the first time I’ve kept vigil. And…I’ll give him a feed, if he wants it. No big deal. And you’re a bloody mess, Spike: you stink. Go on: have your goddam shower.”  
  
Spike got to his feet, carefully balanced, prepared for this to go wrong in any of a hundred ways. He felt as light-headed and strange as if he’d fed Mike already. He couldn’t imagine what Buffy’d said, to bring Angel out here.  
  
“All right,” Angel burst out, “I get it: it’s family, all right? He’s yours more than mine, just like you were more mine than Dru’s, whether you liked it or not. Turning some total stranger, that’s nothing, means nothing. It’s the _connection_ \--” The big hands worked, trying to force understanding without Angel’s having to say the words. Then they dropped to his knees, and he gave the glider another push. “Just go on. Get clean.” A weird little chuckle Spike couldn’t interpret.  
  
Still waiting for it to go wrong, Spike tossed the cigarette over the rail into the yard and edged off to the door. Buffy was waiting just inside. With a quick left/right glance, locating Giles on the couch and the witch scowling at the laptop in the den, they fled up the stairs.  
  
**********  
  
In the shower she’d cranked up just short of blistering, Buffy could tell how weary he was: by the way his shoulders slumped, the exhausted way he lifted his face to the stinging spray. When she started soaping his back with the shower gel, pushing her thumbs in hard, he tilted his head, not quite looking at her, saying, “Don’t have to do that, love. Not like we been on patrol.”  
  
Restraint, holding back, knotted him up, too. But she didn’t say that. She wasn’t in the mood for an argument or even a discussion. She was too busy being glad it hadn’t been him out on the porch with Dawn when Fudo manifested. He would have done exactly what Mike had and suffered the same result. She’d wanted to get her hands on him for hours, to stroke and knead all that splendid unbroken skin.  
  
And he’d been so good with Mike, and Dawn, and even Angel. He deserved a reward. And Buffy figured she did, too.  
  
“Turn around,” she directed, and hugged him close as he turned. Warm now with the shower’s heat, he blinked at her, sleepy-eyed and intent. Waiting, she figured, for her to make the first move. Sometimes, unsure, he needed courting, which didn’t bother her at all. She liked having the initiative.  
  
Most of the blood that had soaked through his shirt had washed off. She took care of the rest with the shower gel and the heels of her hands, gradually pushing him back against the tiles, making room. When she took firm hold of his cock, it jumped, and he thumped his head back with his eyes shut. As she bent, meaning to kneel and apply her mouth where she knew he wanted it, she was suddenly whirled and lifted clear of the spray, high enough to drape her legs over his shoulders, gasping and bucking as he mouthed her coarse curls and the soon-swollen, responsive folds of flesh underneath.  
  
When she was solidly braced, his hands lifted to her breasts--pressing, pinching, pulling--as he continued to nuzzle, tongue, and nip her below, muttering, “That’s right, come for me, sweet, all beautiful for me, could climb inside an’ die there and be happy forever, if I dust that’s what you do, stick me up your sweet quim and it’ll all be fine--”  
  
Something in that bizarre request set her off. She convulsed, wailing, gripping wet handfuls of hair. Held through her climax, she felt herself lifted and dismounted, sliding down the tiles until they were face to face, looking into each other’s eyes.  
  
Locking hands behind his head, she yanked them into a kissing war: seeing who could press hardest, delve deepest, gnaw at swollen lips the most excruciatingly, both breathing hard. When she clasped her legs around his waist he pushed into her, all in one go, and began the frantic rocking that meant he wasn’t gonna last. So she tipped her head aside, offering the mark that was another level of completion for them both.  
  
Immediately he mouthed her there but didn’t bite, muttering the usual litany of _hot, good, tight,_ and assorted graphic obscenities into her ear until he went rigid and incoherent in his release and she clutched with internal muscles to hold him there as long as possible. She had the sense that she was protecting him somehow, holding him safe, as he leaned heavily against her, spent.  
  
They both jumped as the water turned icy.  
  
Spike was out of the shower first, complaining, “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Have to get a bigger boiler, always cuts out just at the wrong time--” Grabbing a big towel off the towel bar, he turned holding it for her, caping her within it and then just holding: not ready yet to be apart.  
  
“I saw stars,” she confessed, almost shyly.  
  
“Bang your head on the tile, that’ll do it.” Taking up a corner of the towel, he began rubbing her hair. “Wanted to get you off first. Make up for me ducking out more than I should.”  
  
“You were there when it mattered. And I guess…it’s new and different, right? On the astral side?” He made an affirmative noise. “What’s it like?”  
  
He paused in his rubbing, and she turned enough to see his eyes, where everything showed. His eyes were unfocused, faraway: blinking; thinking; remembering. “Haven’t yet found the words. Maybe there are none, like the Watcher said…. Best I can say, it’s like the stars on a clear night. And like what the sun would be, perfect, in summer, everything warm and plain, roundabout, and so wonderful you don’t think you can stand it. It’s all the same, and it’s all changed, and you can see it all _becoming_ ….” Something like a self-conscious laugh and a bent head, deflecting the intensity. “ _Said_ I didn’t have the words, and then I try to tell you.”  
  
“I wish I could see it with you.”  
  
“Wish you could too, sweet. S’all that’s lacking, you there. But…can’t touch proper, there. No surfaces, no outsides. Your outsides are so fine, and your insides, too….” A more emphatic rub, playful, and a hug, before he went on, “An’ I don’t think it’d be, for you, what it is to me. Have to live in the dark a century for it to take hold like it does…. To Bit and the witch, an’ the Watcher too, I suppose, seems like it’s just another kind of place. Not that for me, though.”  
  
“I figured.” Sliding out of the towel, Buffy reached for the hooks on the back of the door…and realized only one robe hung there. Pink chenille: Willow’s.  
  
They looked at each other, then at the pile of dirty and/or bloodied clothes on the floor. Resigned, Spike started to reach down, but Buffy stopped his hand, saying, “Wait.”  
  
Pulling on the robe, she checked the hall, then dashed to her bedroom. Dithering only a moment, she pulled on a nice, filmy, totally impractical black top hung with ribbon bows ready for untying with teeth--she anticipated further extras; possibly several hours’ worth--and the matching high-cut bottoms: like underpants, except sexy. She drew around her one of her ugly, droopy, warm terry robes--white, with blue forget-me-nots along the collar. Collecting the damp chenille robe, she hustled back to the bathroom. Tapping twice, she whispered, “It’s me!” and slid inside.  
  
Spike had the used towel around his hips. When Buffy started to shrug out of the larger robe, to give it to him, he took the damp one instead although it was small on him and barely covered the essentials.  
  
“Smells like you,” he explained, fastening the belt. “And s’not all covered in girly flowers an’ such.”  
  
She’d long since given up being squicked by instances of vampires’ acute sense of smell. Shrugging, she pulled the oversized (to her) terry robe together and they made a reasonably decorous exit to the basement, not counting one small pause at the foot of the stairs when Spike wanted to check on Mike (and display his post-shower-with-extras satisfaction to Angel) and Buffy thought it a bit much and wouldn’t let him.  
  
“He’s accepted it. Us,” she said, herding him downstairs with judicious pushes. “We don’t have to rub his nose in it.”  
  
“He’d like that. He’d like to watch, even. Get him a pencil and a pad, he’s all set. Used to like to draw me an’ Dru--”  
  
“Spike, you’re a pig. And any conversation about you and Drusilla better not contain the word ‘bed.’”  
  
“Wasn’t always a bed,” Spike rejoined, looking around with one of his cocky tongue-to-teeth grins. Then he suddenly sobered, gazing at her as they came to the bottom of the basement stairs. “Sorry. Having him around…makes me remember. Expect it does him, too. One reason we don’t get on. You’re another, of course…. D’you still love me, treasure?” he asked, gone absurdly, sweetly humble. “Bad, rude thing that I am?”  
  
By way of answer, Buffy dropped the robe. By the way Spike’s eyes went wide and dark, it was the right answer.  
  
**********  
  
Still a little dizzy and shaky after her nap, holding the rail and then sliding her hand along the wall where the rail was broken, Dawn crept down the stairs, fully cold-attired in sweats-with-hoodie and a snap-front lilac down vest (Buffy’s: snuck from her closet).  
  
Though the light was still on, the den was vacant; and Giles was camping out with Oz, in the van. So she slipped out the door unobserved.  
  
The porch light was still on, too. She found Mike covered with the electric blanket. Laid over the blanket was what she at first took for Spike’s duster, covering him from neck to knees. Crouching beside him, she located his right hand, cold and heavy: she figured the slight motion of lifting it, clasping it, wouldn’t hurt anything. He was out, didn’t know she was there. That was OK because _she_ knew.  
  
“You shouldn’t do that. He could come up at you.”  
  
She’d subliminally absorbed the squeak-creak of the glider chains and assumed it was Spike. Of course she’d heard the sexual gymnastics in the bathroom--blessedly short, now that they had the bed in the soundproofed basement to retreat to. But she knew Spike wouldn’t leave Mike unattended for long.  
  
Not Spike. Angel: big, dark, idly rocking. In dark slacks and rolled-up shirt-sleeves (fresh shirt) open at the collar.  
  
As quietly, she said, “I know. But he won’t.”  
  
“He could.”  
  
“Not until his spine’s healed. No leverage.”  
  
“He’s got one good hand. That’s all he’d need. Grab you, haul you down, and that would be that.”  
  
“I’m holding that hand. If he moved, I’d know.”  
  
“Not soon enough. It’s not worth the risk.”  
  
Dawn knew Angel was right. Starved and not completely conscious of what he was doing, Spike had gone for her once; and before that, he’d gone for her on Angel’s irresistible command as Angel tested the depth of his control. She figured Angel regarded her as something like a crash dummy, important only because Buffy would be mad at him if Dawn got hurt on his watch. Dawn wasn’t too fond of Angel even if he _was_ right.  
  
Sitting back on her heels, she mentioned, “I know about the child. That he’s yours.”  
  
The creaking stopped. “Damn. Spike.”  
  
“He told me, yes. We consulted about it,” Dawn replied with dignity. “He wanted to help, but there was no way then.”  
  
“You haven’t told.”  
  
Dawn shook her head. “I promised Spike.” Feeling she’d spelled out her allegiance sufficiently, she patted Mike’s cheek once--sunken, dry, corpse-cold, the flesh receding from the bone--then stood up because, after all, Angel was right. A blood-starved vamp tended to take what he needed. Strictly instinctual. She didn’t want to put either herself or Mike at risk for that.  
  
Stuffing her hands into the vest’s pockets, she perched herself primly on the middle of the glider, leaving Angel his personal space. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat on the glider. The past summer had been a bit fraught and frantic. She found she was tall enough now to sit with her feet flat on the porch. Neat!  
  
As she settled into the shared vigil, she found Angel’s company undemanding and peaceful. He wasn’t always jittering around, fiddling with cigarettes, talking just to be talking, the way Spike did. He didn’t mind silence. He was just _there._  
  
Like Mike in that way, she realized. Mike had that quiet in him, too, underneath the vamp suddenness. _Patient_ was seldom a word she’d associate with Spike; but Mike was patient as stone. Not indifferent, though, or inattentive: he noticed everything. Just didn’t feel compelled to chatter on about it…except with her, of course. Like on the phone…. To her, Mike would open up, let the raw emotions spill out unconsidered and only lightly censored, for decency.  
  
She wondered what it meant, that she’d claimed him. Well, everybody, really, but Mike was the reason. Clearly Fudo had recognized the Lady in her but he’d taken her for an avatar, not an individual, the same as he had Buffy. She wondered how long it would take Fudo to realize the truth--if he’d still defer to her then. Likely not. All she’d bought them was a little time. Time enough, maybe, for Mike to heal….  
  
Though the coat covering Mike was leather and black, she could see now it was the wrong cut and shape to be Spike's duster. Carefully casual and offhand, she asked, "Your coat?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Dawn gave him a sidewise look. "Won't it get blood on it?"  
  
"Nah. He's bled out about as much as he's going to. Hasn't even shorted out the blanket. And it would only be the lining. Linings are easy to replace. It keeps the heat in better." That was about one too many excuses, but Dawn let it pass without remark. Angel gave her a look in turn--just the corner of his eye, minimal head movement. "You like him." It was a prompt rather than a question.  
  
Dawn shrugged and lied, “He’s all right. For a vamp. He’s six years old.”  
  
Silence. She thought Angel was working out the timeline. Eventually he said, “I don’t remember turning him. It’s not generally a thing I’d do.”  
  
“It was Angelus.”  
  
“Oh. Right." Angel made a frowning, reflective _hmmm_ sort of face. "Not so much forgot as didn't bother noticing, I guess. Didn't care.... Spike’s apparently adopted him. Why?”  
  
Almost, she responded _Because Spike loves him._ But that would be Spike’s to say, not hers. So she replied with another shrug, that was itself a lie.  
  
“Family,” said Angel sourly, answering himself. “What’s he like?”  
  
“Apart from vamp normal? He and Spike fight a lot, to settle who’s boss. It’s not settled yet. I imagine you can understand that.”  
  
“I imagine I can. What else?”  
  
“He…likes how I smell. So he hangs around a lot. I guess…we’re friends. But it’s Sue he fucks,” Dawn spat out with sudden bitterness. “Maybe you remember Sue: she’s a vamp now, but she was one of the SITs. Got herself turned, on purpose, in Chicago, last summer. Stupid bint,” she added rancorously, quoting Spike, figuring Angel would get that too.  
  
“It doesn’t mean anything, Dawn. A vamp will take anything that moves, or that doesn’t move fast enough. We’re not…particular.”  
  
“Mike’s particular. Like a Victorian gentleman with his piece on the side.”  
  
“Don’t talk about what you don’t know,” Angel said curtly. “He’s keeping that away from you. To protect you--”  
  
“I’m not Buffy. And he’s not you!”  
  
“No. Of course. I think I’m right, though.”  
  
“When do you not think you’re right?” Dawn challenged, and got a chuckle.  
  
“There have been times, honestly. I always figured not dusting Spike, that was a mistake. But you like the little bastard too.”  
  
“I love him,” Dawn replied, finding that admission less charged and wanting Angel to be in no doubt about it. “And he loves me. And Buffy. Differently.”  
  
“I sort of figured that. Wouldn’t think he’d be able to keep his obsessions all neat and compartmentalized that way.”  
  
“We work at it. Besides, I don’t smell like Buffy--I smell like me. Smell is a big thing to vamps, I’m told. Also, I’m not a Slayer, and it’s Slayers he has the thing about.”  
  
“Yeah. He does.”  
  
“So no problemo. He marked me once, I made him do it, really, didn’t know any better then…and he was sooo upset! He wouldn’t come within a city block of me until it was taken care of.”  
  
She expected him to say something about that, or about Mike’s fresh mark on her arm. But he didn’t.  
  
“He’s a good fighter,” Angel allowed, and Dawn recollected Angel would have had several chances to observe, even before he knew who Mike was.  
  
“He’s an awesome fighter! The best, next to Spike. He was a mercenary, before.”  
  
“He was just outclassed. Rocket launcher might take that thing out…or maybe not even that. Something that size, that can change so fast….” Angel shook his head. Looping back to a previous topic, he went on, “I was with Darla over a century. I worshipped her, did whatever she said or nearly, because she’d given me this life, this power, this freedom…as it was then, before I knew…. I shared her bed, when she let me. And in all that time, never loved her. Not an ounce. Until she came to me, human and resigned to it, and I tried to keep Dru from turning her. Failed at that…. And afterward, pregnant, dusting herself in that alley so the baby could be born…. I loved her then. When it didn’t matter. When it was too late.”  
  
“It always matters. What’s he like--the baby?”  
  
“Connor. His name is Connor. I named him that. He’s wonderful! So soft, and the little fingers and toes, smelling like milk and shit. I hate diapers, but I didn’t mind, because it was him. The little starfish hands and how he’d sleep, butt in the air, sleep so deep I had to lean down and listen to make sure he was still breathing. And he’d cry, scream his head off, but he’d quiet right down when I held him, he knew it was me.” Angel’s face was animated, the dark eyes alight, the hands sketching the shape of his happiness in the air. He added shyly, “And…he liked it when I changed, showed him the bumpies. Like it was some sort of neat trick, that his daddy could do and nobody else could. He…was wonderful. I miss him. Every day.”  
  
The animation was gone, replaced almost by the usual somber mask. But not quite: Dawn saw it now as clenched, not calm. Braced against pain. Keeping it all inside for Connor, to whom it belonged.  
  
Dawn didn’t recollect ever knowing a doting father. She guessed she now had a benchmark for future comparison. Mindful of Spike’s concerns, she asked, “Not to be heartless, but if we can’t get him back, could you…have another?”  
  
“No. No, I don’t think so. No. He’s all and everything. A miracle. Prophesied as ‘the Destroyer,’ whatever that means. I hate prophecies! And as often as not, a miraculous birth is part of the usual prophecy package. It was him, not me or Darla, that let him come to be. We…we were only the instruments. Not anything special about us, except for that. But we were granted a grace. I don’t know why. Except that it was for him. He was fated to be mine. And he’s still fated. I’ll get him back. I have to. Otherwise, it makes no sense. There are things working in this beyond what we know, or can know. I believe that. Spike, he’s got hold of something, God knows how, and that’s progress. I never even got as far as Fudo.”  
  
“Getting past him,” Spike said, easing onto the porch while lighting the inevitable cigarette, “is what’s gonna be the problem. ‘Lo, Bit, what are you doing up? Be sunrise in an hour, about.”  
  
“I just wanted to see…he was all right. Which he isn’t, but well, you know,” Dawn replied awkwardly.  
  
“Yeah. Guess I do.” Looking to Angel, Spike asked, “You feed him?”  
  
“I’m going to,” Angel replied, glowery and defensive. “Before he’s moved will be best. He’ll get the most good from it then.”  
  
“You see to that, then, while I get the cellar door off its hinges. Move him on that, I figured.”  
  
When Spike went back inside, Angel still didn’t stir. His hands were clasped together, the fingers working uncomfortably over and around each other. He stared straight ahead--past the porch, into the night.  
  
It came to Dawn that she was the hold-up here: Angel didn’t want to feed Mike with her watching. She got the impression he found the prospect embarrassing, though that was ginormously dumb: there wasn’t much about vampires’ personal functions she didn’t know about, hadn’t seen. It wasn’t as if they had to go to the bathroom or anything, except occasionally to throw up, as Spike did, discreetly yakking up in one tidy episode whatever “people food” he’d consumed for the flavor or the sociability. Not as if vamps had a working digestive system, after all; and the imagined alternative would have been supremely ooksome. She shivered.  
  
“I would,” she said, “but I can’t. Slayer healing isn’t part of the package. I have to wait a week, Spike says. So I consider it a personal favor to me, that you offered. You _did_ offer, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Angel confirmed without enthusiasm.  
  
“Then that’s good. Later, I’ll call Rona, have her pick up some of the bagged at the hospital, although she’ll have to put it on the card, can’t invoice it anymore. But that’s later. Now would be good,” she hinted, nodding encouragingly.  
  
“Maybe,” Angel suggested, heavily thoughtful, “you could get some coffee started. Or tea, whatever’s around.”  
  
“All right.” Poised and obedient, Dawn got up and went inside. She could take a hint when it was the size of a 2x4, ruthlessly applied. She’d let Angel have his privacy if it helped get the job done. Besides, she was willing to grant him bonus points because of the coat.  
  
By the basement door, thumbing out the hinge pins Xander had set with a hammer, Spike asked, “He doing it?”  
  
Continuing into the kitchen, Dawn peered into the refrigerator for the coffee can. The power going out shouldn’t affect coffee…should it? Have to chance it. “He will, now that there’s no audience. And Spike? About that other, you were worried about? That there could be an encore…of the recent ‘miracle’?” She made quote marks in the air with her fingers, trying to choose words delicately and obliquely, in case Buffy suddenly popped up from the basement. “No chance. It was a one-shot, almost literally.”  
  
When there was no immediate response, she paused in filling the (unplugged) coffee maker in the sink to lean and look into the hall. Spike had stopped too, regarding the floor. “He say that? Angel?”  
  
“Yeah. And for whatever it’s worth, I believe him. Believe _he_ believes it, anyway.”  
  
“He told you? Just like that?”  
  
“Not ‘just like that.’ I have my ways,” Dawn announced loftily, resuming her task.  
  
“So you do. Winkle anything out of anybody. Got the makings of a fine spy in you, Bit.”  
  
“I think I’d prefer to be viewed as an interpreter. Or a confidante.”  
  
“Whatever you say. Wasn’t him, then. Or Herself. Just happened, like.”  
  
“Seems so: the word used was ‘instrument.’ I’d think that would ring familiar bells for you…. I judge you’re safe on the spunk front,” Dawn replied, making him cough a startled laugh as he turned back to unhinging the door.  
  
**********  
  
Blood came in all sorts of flavors and textures, spiced with all sorts of emotions. Mike knew that what stayed with him, though fading, that was Dawn. It was energetic--all sparkly and fizzy like champagne, with a rich undertone of fear, concern, and the love she wouldn’t admit but he knew, all the same. Concentrated, somehow: working in him like the first feed after abstinence when you sucked out the last of the life, immediate satisfaction. But every mouthful he’d drawn was like that, like a full feed.  
  
And this time, for nobody else but him. This time, he wasn’t just a convenient carrier, to transfer Dawn’s concern to Spike in a way they’d both accept since Spike wouldn’t feed from her direct, only from the Slayer. Hard to have the taste of it, the gift of it, and know it was only for a little while and not for him. This time, it was his, freely granted--benediction and prize and affirmation that he’d done right, come between her and harm, and this, her ultimate gift, the life of her sweet body, honorably earned.  
  
And he’d marked her: felt it take and hum with achieved possession. She’d consented to it. _And_ she’d first claimed him as hers, to that Fudo-thing.  
  
Things would be different between them now.  
  
He didn’t much mind not being able to move. Didn’t really want to move, all warm somehow and drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing her voice sometimes and happy to know her there, though sometimes he got confused and thought he was being medevaced out of some freefire zone and was worried, not knowing yet how bad he’d been hit, whether he was still all there. Which was foolish, memories from the before. He didn’t have to fear such things anymore. Either he was dusted, gone, or he’d be all right.  
  
There was no pain. That probably should have bothered him, but it didn’t. The lack of sensation freed him to contemplate the wonder of achieved desire.  
  
Gradually, indignantly, he felt himself slipping into blood debt. Shouldn’t need any more than what he had. The least taste should have been enough. Instead he felt odd twinges as though connections were sparking and then shorting out--as though his body was an unseen landscape under an artillery barrage. He felt as though he was somehow collapsing into himself, cracks opening as they did in parched ground waiting for rain.  
  
The blood that came to him then was a revelation. Nothing like Dawn’s--with a completely different power. Vampire blood: that, he knew at once. Not sweet, like human. It was dark, and bitter, and slow--he had to pull hard to get enough to swallow. It was ancient and more powerful than anything he’d ever tasted or even imagined. And yet familiar. He felt his demon leap within him in savage recognition.  
  
This was the blood that had made him.  
  
He knew nothing else until the blood was withdrawn and a voice told him, “That’s enough. Greedy pup, aren’t you? Keep still, don’t move.” The hand that belonged to that voice, to that blood, pushed him flat although he had no consciousness of having stirred.  
  
Faintly, he could feel his whole body like a diagram laid out in electrons, filmy and insubstantial. He wasn’t quite connected to it yet but he knew it was there.  
  
“You think that’s something,” the voice said, “you should have had a taste of the Master, the eldest of our line. Not that he’d have let you. That was only a special treat for those who’d pleased him. He favored Darla, and she was drunk for a month on it. I never pleased him, so I never got any. Never had a taste of the bloodline before, boy?”  
  
He’d had Spike’s blood and thought it fine. But the power he’d tasted there he now knew for an echo. This was the source, the thing itself. He was too dazed and astonished to feel it as disloyalty. It was merely a fact. The sense of connection was beyond argument. Whatever Spike claimed and Mike pretended, this was his Sire.  
  
“Michael.” That was Spike’s voice, close and quiet. “We’re gonna move you now. Inside. The light’s coming--can you feel it?”  
  
Mike knew nothing except the blood, the voices, and, faintly, his body. He tried to say so but couldn’t remember how that worked.  
  
Spike said, “You stay perfectly quiet. Don’t want to get anything out of line. Got a door here, gonna slide it under, put you on it. We’ll be as easy with you as we can.”  
  
Mike thought it was the sunrise. It felt like burning, like every cell in his body had ignited and gone incandescent.  
  
When he next was aware, though, his body felt more solid, more definite. He could feel he had weight, and substance. So he guessed it hadn’t been the sun after all.  
  
He felt a touch, and knew the beloved ambience. “Dawn.”  
  
“I’m right here. In an hour or so, Spike will give you a feed, and that will help. And there’s bagged on order. I’m not allowed.”  
  
She was close, smelling all sweetly like herself, with his mark upon her. So that was all right. He slept.  
  
**********  
  
In Buffy’s opinion, three vampires in the house were several too many. But there was nothing to be done and no place, anymore, to spare since although the basement was pretty much spoken for, she hadn’t yet vacated her bedroom (clothes, makeup, a mirror, etc.) and she was damned if she was gonna have Angel sleep in her room anyway, even on a mattress on the floor. But Angel pretty much had to stay because he was helping feed Mike (who couldn’t move or be moved) in the den.  
  
Spike, arguing with Willow about access to the laptop, was in the kitchen where Buffy despaired of making breakfast--and Dawn was somnambulating here and there like a lost pup in the intervals she wasn’t hovering over the invalid.  
  
Standing in the hall, Buffy told Angel uncertainly, “You could sleep on the couch.”  
  
“I’ll be all right.”  
  
“There’s a mattress upstairs, I could drag it down….”  
  
“Really. Don’t bother. I can--”  
  
The doorbell rang, and it was Rona with a cool box full of packaged blood. Buffy waved her toward the kitchen, where there were mugs and where dirty mugs could be washed. Spike immediately exited to take his turn at feeding Mike and to avoid being in the same room as Angel. Spike made a point of giving Buffy a quick kiss in passing. Since punching him in the nose would only have made things worse and possibly given Angel the wrong impression, Buffy grimly just kept going.  
  
Opening a packet and pouring its repulsive contents into a mug held at arm’s length, Buffy commented over her shoulder, “Spike doesn’t like it heated, says the microwave kills the flavor or something. Should I--”  
  
Angel had his head lifted, sniffing. He frowned, or frowned more--it was hard to tell. “That’s human.”  
  
“Yeah, from the blood bank.” Sensing criticism, Buffy set down the mug to fold her arms. “We buy it, Angel. With money Spike earns, translating for the Council. Are you gonna make a thing about it?”  
  
“Not a thing….” Angel looked uncomfortable. “It’s just…I don’t do human anymore.”  
  
“Fine.” Buffy chased Rona back up the hall and caught her by the door. “One more stop. A couple gallons of pig, from the butcher. They take plastic, right?”  
  
“I passed there on the way to the hospital,” Rona responded, annoyed. “I could have picked it up then, if you’d told me.”  
  
“OK, so I lose efficiency points. Just do it, all right?”  
  
“Is it for Mike? Because since when is he a second-class citizen around here? How come--?”  
  
Buffy shut her eyes. “It’s for Angel, all right? He doesn’t do human.”  
  
“Yeah, I saw: the Generalissimo vamp’s here. How come?”  
  
Buffy sighed. “It’s complicated.”  
  
“Is there an apocalypse, and nobody told us?”  
  
Spike came out of the den, rolling down his sleeve. He noted the empty cool box dangling from Rona’s hand, then looked inquiringly at Buffy. She said, “In the kitchen.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
Rona caught his arm, and he wheeled about and waited while the SIT inspected him. “Spike, you’re more than a quart low. What’s going on here?”  
  
“Nothing you lot will have to mess with. Go on: do like the Slayer said.”  
  
“All right, but I’m telling Ken: we’re part of the team, too!”  
  
Spike’s eyes went yellow under a heavier brow. “You or Ken show up here without you’re called, you’ll get pitched right out again.”  
  
Rona swung toward the door, responding, “We’ll see about that!” She thumped the door behind her.  
  
Everybody was making points.  
  
Face falling back into human contours, Spike gave Buffy a _Well, I tried_ look and continued slowly toward the kitchen. About halfway, he stopped and sagged against the staircase wall.  
  
Half suspecting it was a ploy, Buffy went all the same. Instead of a mug, she filled a plastic pitcher and carried it back to Spike. Passing it over, she inquired tartly, “You need help holding it?” She was a little annoyed at his refusal to feed from her, considering she was there, and willing, and reportedly tasty, and it would have perked him right up again.  
  
Spike just took the pitcher and began drinking, not even complaining about the lack of Froot-Loops or something crunchy to add the extra tang of the uber-disgusting.  
  
Drifting by, Dawn asked him, “When’s the last time you ran a downtown sweep?”  
  
Looking puzzled and dim, Spike quit drinking. “Dunno, Bit. Few days, anyway. Why?”  
  
“Not since we set out for Terminal Beach, right?”  
  
“Maybe. Don’t recall.”  
  
“Ahuh,” Dawn replied in a knowing tone, twirling around the newel post, and went dancing up the stairs with both of them watching her go.  
  
“What was that about?” Buffy asked.  
  
“No clue, love.” Spike raised the pitcher, then stopped, throwing a sharp glance upward. Some penny had dropped, but Buffy was distracted by the doorbell announcing Oz and a rumpled, unshaven, frazzled-looking Giles, who inquired plaintively, “Tea?”  
  
“OK,” Buffy called, loud enough to carry, “everybody out of the kitchen--now! I’m making breakfast!”  
  
“Oh,” said Giles, face falling, “must you?”  
  
“Perkins,” said Oz, turning and leading the way back down the steps.  
  
Buffy gave a passing thought to all the fresh groceries (that did _not_ include yummy maple syrup), then grabbed a jacket off the hall peg. “Dawn, Will! Perkins!”  
  
**********  
  
Left in sole custody of the laptop, Spike was compiling the components of a spell, squinting because he didn’t want to try to locate his glasses in the disordered (as in everything shoved everyplace it didn’t belong) den and he’d sooner be roasted on a spit than wear them where Angel could see anyway.  
  
Angel was behind him, waiting for Rona’s delivery of fucking pigs’ blood, which Spike figured would be a nicely awkward thing to comment on while having another round of the good stuff, himself. Not that bagged blood compared to taking it hot from a live…well, he supposed the word had to be _victim_ …much less to Slayer blood, which he wouldn’t be pointing out until Mike was up and about and had no more need to tap the bloodline--better for healing than human because it strengthened the demon in making the body conform to the unchanging template. Wouldn’t allow himself a taste of Buffy until then--not and pass it along. That was _his_.  
  
So was Mike, but feeding an injured junior of the bloodline took precedence. Spike had limits: until half an hour ago, it'd probably been a week since he'd fed. (And how the hell had Bit twigged to his taking just a little, here and there, on his sweeps?) Although Spike grudged sharing that duty, he felt he had no option but to make Angel accept his responsibility as sire. Mike needed more than Spike had...and his true sire was available: eldest of the bloodline. Had to be realistic about such things.  
  
The fact that he and Angel were uneasily allied over the seemingly unavoidable matter of Quor'toth didn’t mean Spike wanted the brooding bastard to feel anything like at home here. Wouldn’t provoke him to a fight, or laying down one of his damn _geases_ again…but there were little, subtle things Spike could do to make plain that only the circumstances (and Buffy) made Angel welcome here. Spike didn’t.  
  
Shoulder propped against a cabinet, Angel was keeping carefully clear of the light spilling in through the kitchen window. It hadn’t reached the kitchen island where Spike was sitting yet, but it would; Spike was looking forward to that moment.  
  
“You ever used an athame?” he asked idly.  
  
“Seen a few,” Angel allowed. “Not worth much as a dagger. All fancy-schmancy decorations.”  
  
“Oh, that’s the New Age Earth Mother crap, like they stock at the Magic Box. Not what I mean.”  
  
“Then what?”  
  
Ignoring the question, keying a few notes in a drop-down comment box, Spike asked, “Ever make one?”  
  
“Hell, no. What are you playing with crap like that for?”  
  
“Not playing: researching. It’s what I do now.” Spike tried to keep his tone neutral, but some of the sour probably still came through. After all, it was Angel. They knew each other’s nuances, ears tuned to every shading, every silence.  
  
“Yeah. I heard. Took the Council’s shilling.”  
  
“Something like. Far’s it goes…. They get translations of stupid spells that don’t work and some few that do, accounts of idiots that got in over their heads, called what they couldn’t control, and like that. I get…access to the whole of the Watcher archive, or nearly. Got caught at it, but they can’t limit what I can look at without buggering the whole deal, so I still have the best of it. For awhile, anyway…..” Spike shut the drop-down box, carefully saved his notes, and pulled up another source he’d bookmarked--Mesopotamian, this time. Nasty alphabet. Cunieform, like something algebraic. And the tenses were a bitch.  
  
Never could tell when his access might be cut off. Had to collect everything he’d need right away--despite his head being all swimmy from letting Mike feed and a headache coming on besides from the eyestrain--in case that happened. Between the witch and Anya, and maybe the Watcher, he could probably fill in any gaps. Not as though any pre-made spell existed for what he meant to do anyway. Had to be intuition: what could be cobbled together with what, and not blow up in his face.  
  
“So,” Angel said disparagingly. “You’re playing with magic now.”  
  
Spike granted himself a short glance. “Healed Dru, didn’t I? Some other little bits, over the years. Mostly can tell what works from the trash.”  
  
“An athame, that’s what--associated with fire and air, right? Not a good combination for a vamp.” By his voice, Angel had moved off, nearer the hall.  
  
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” Spike responded agreeably. Turning, he slid off the chair, full into the blaze of harmless sunlight through the kitchen window of necro-tempered glass. And smiled.


	8. Needful Things

A thunderous _bang_. Casa Summers bounced as though dropped from a height.  
  
Usually a night owl, Willow scrambled up from the couch and the laptop and ran wild-eyed into the hall, thinking it was attack, a mile-high Fudo trying to breach the wards so automatically chanting to strengthen them--  
  
Spike erupted from the basement, pursued by billowing smoke and waving it off. Soot-streaked from head to bare feet, wearing only jeans, he looked like a cat that had experimentally poked a claw in a socket. And even from two yards away, he stank: pungent, like a haystack of singed herbs.  
  
Vamps claimed magic smelled, tainted its user.  
  
Willow had no trouble detecting _this_ smell. As Buffy burst up the stairs, coughing and wheezing, holding a robe together in front, Willow wheeled to haul open the front door, gasping, “Spike! What in heaven’s name have you done!”  
  
Chin lifted in unconvincing defiance, Spike asserted, "Done nothing. Why d'you think it was me?"  
  
Willow ticked off points on her fingers. "First, you're all singed, and nobody else is. Second, you reek of it. Third, I _know_ you. Should I continue?"  
  
Not replying, Spike brought his right hand to his mouth, licking off blood: another stain for the abused hall carpet. Hugging him from behind, Buffy was demanding, “Are you all right?”  
  
Everybody converged: Dawn in flannel pj’s, leaning over the stair rail halfway down, Angel from the den, Oz and rumpled Giles from the yard, even Mike, uncertainly upright and propped against the den’s doorframe, everybody talking at once, and scorched, seething Spike in the middle of it.  
  
Angel made an odd noise loud enough to make Willow look. He was laughing. Spike barking, “Shut up, Poof!” did no good. Angel tipped against the wall, holding his ribs, emitting big uncontrolled Ha ha’s.  
  
If not for Buffy hanging on, it would have turned into another Spike-Angel thump-fest. Spike subsided, literally fuming. Angel just kept laughing. Willow didn’t think she’d ever heard Angel laugh before.  
  
With the door open, the smoke began to dissipate.  
  
“So,” Giles said, adjusting a too-small orange UC Sunnydale sweatshirt Oz had apparently loaned him to sleep in. “Not Fudo, after all, it seems.” He snorted and turned half away…snickering.  
  
Spike glared. Then within Buffy’s embrace, his shoulders hunched defensively. Looking at the floor, he burst out, “So maybe I don’t have it quite adjusted yet. Piece from here, piece from there, substitutions--what the fuck do you expect?”  
  
“Dedicating the athame,” Willow deduced, arms crossed, tapping fingers. She lifted her head, sniffing judiciously. “Isn’t that hensbane? That’s no part of any dedication spell I ever saw. And…mugwort?”  
  
“Mugwort!” If Angel laughed any harder, he’d fall down.  
  
“Had to improvise, didn’t I?” Spike retorted, sullenly indignant. “Not like it’s something you can buy at a shop, ready-made.”  
  
“No…but you could have asked me,” Willow countered, hurt and somewhat aggrieved that he hadn’t.  
  
“None of your bloody business!”  
  
“None of my-- Oh. I see. That accounts for the blood, then.” Spike, Willow realized, had attempted to power a dedication with blood magic--the most dire, and the most unpredictable, of earth magics. Not intrinsically dark but eminently unwise to mess with. The more you knew, the more you stayed away from such things.  
  
Spike knew just enough to try it, she thought, and not enough to stop him. That's why he hadn't consulted her. “Spike, what exactly were you trying to do?”  
  
Giles managed to quit giggling and discipline his face to something like gravity. “Yes, Spike-- _do_ tell us.”  
  
“Yes, tell us about it,” Angel echoed sweetly. Willow scowled at him to no effect: he was enjoying Spike’s discomfiture far too much. “You know so much about magic, what could possibly go wrong?”  
  
Giving Spike’s torso a squeeze, Buffy lifted on tiptoe to murmur in his ear, “I think you should. After all, we’re a team. _And you nearly brought the house down on us!”_  
  
Wincing away from the volume, Spike shrugged free, complaining, “Try to do something useful, everybody takes it for a joke!”  
  
“No, Spike,” Angel corrected happily, “you’re the joke. Now everybody knows it, that’s all.”  
  
Willow speared him with a glance. “Angel, you’re not being helpful here.”  
  
Angel lifted hands, solemnly disavowing evil intent. Then he grinned broadly, somewhat spoiling the effect. At least he shut up.  
  
Meanwhile Spike had grabbed open the closet door and swiped up a bottle from Oz’s collection stored there. With Buffy in hesitant pursuit, he stormed out onto the porch and gone. As Buffy held the door-edge as though unable to decide between following (in her robe) and shutting the door, there was the noise of a motorcycle starting and roaring off.  
  
Buffy shut the door and slowly attended to belting up the robe.  
  
Appearing from the kitchen, Dawn began fumigating the hall with prolonged blasts from a can of air freshener. Angel winced, and he and Mike retreated back to the den: lavender was so not a welcome addition to the current stink.  
  
Carefully casual, spraying, Dawn commented, “He’s beyond the wards. Should we be worried about this?”  
  
They’d been holed up five days. Except for Oz and Giles, whose first cautious excursion to the van hadn’t provoked a renewed attack from Fudo, and who thereafter had come and gone at will, concluding that Fudo’s targets were currently limited to the principals, the fighters--the Slayer and the vamps. Willow hadn’t ventured out, not wanting to find out her status the hard way.  
  
And Dawn and Angel had been occupied with Mike, semi-ambulatory now.  
  
Looking mildly contrite, Angel leaned out to offer, “I’ll find him, haul him back, if you want.”  
  
Not a great idea, since it would just put both of them at risk. Presumably Angel knew that, going by his lack of enthusiasm.  
  
Buffy shook her head. “Spike really knows this town. If he gets into trouble, he can duck into some sewer. I don’t see how Fudo could go ginormous on him in there. And one on one, size not a factor, Spike can hold his own against anybody.” Turning, she requested, “Will, explain it to me: what was he trying to do?”  
  
“Dedicate the athame. Sort of a magical tool--like a wand--except it’s a knife. You have to…well, charge it. Tune it. To make it answer to your will. It’s a necessary element in casting some spells--not an actual working knife. Blunt blade, small… My guess is that Spike wanted it to be more. An actual weapon. And he mixed weapon elements into the spell, and the mix…blew up on him when he combined them. The vamp blood, maybe.” Willow gestured open-handed: she could think of a score of ways such a spell could have gone wrong, even leaving out the blood magic. Just substituted ingredients, and spells at cross-purposes with one another, would be ample.  
  
He should have consulted her before putting such a boneheaded plan into action. Yeah, sure--like he ever did that.  
  
“I shouldn’t have found it funny,” Giles observed contritely. “Or at least shouldn’t have admitted it. I’m sure he meant well.”  
  
“Nearly brought down the wards,” Willow declared, grimacing. “Not funny at all. Now I have to check every one--see that they’re all water-tight, so to speak. Fudo-proof. Say--where’s Oz?”  
  
Glancing around, Giles speculated, “Gone back to the van? I’ll look.”  
  
“I don’t think so,” Buffy said, starting up the stairs. “He must have left through the kitchen. So I think he’s gone after Spike. So that’s sorted: the two of them should be able to handle anything that comes up. I’m gonna camp out in my room, OK? Until the basement airs out. Spray down there next, Dawn, all right?”  
  
“I’m on it,” Dawn agreed, brisk and cheerful.  
  
Willow shut her eyes, trying to summon the concentration to determine the soundness of the wards. Giles slipped a hand into hers, tacitly offering to let her draw on his stored power. Too cautious, too aware of the cost and the consequences to be an active mage, Giles was a quiet reservoir of energies that he made available to Willow from time to time. His company and support were soothing, strengthening.  
  
“They’re all right,” Willow reported at last. “They held.” She released Giles’ hand to rub her eyes worriedly. “I just hope he has the sense not to try anything away from here.”  
  
“Yes: even from the inside, the wards have a dampening effect. A protection of sorts, limiting the worst sorts of backlash from spellcasting gone awry. I trust he knows that?”  
  
“Whatever he was trying, it was complex; and all his spell components are here, unless he raids the Magic Box, for which Anya would gladly endow him with boils, or worse. So I think we’re all safe from well-meaning amateurs for tonight--him included. Giles, it’s all so complicated! None of us knows what we’re doing or how to do it! None of us really knows what we’re getting into! I don’t yet have a clue what to do about Fudo, much less Quor’toth!”  
  
Giles rested a hand on her elbow. “Do we ever? We’ll deal with the situation as we find it, as we always have. With as much preparation and forethought as is possible, under the circumstances. For instance: I haven’t yet had a chance to report what I’ve learned from Ethan about circumstances in Quor’toth. If the wards are secure, come sit down and I’ll explain.”  
  
**********  
  
It took several hours before Spike was drunk enough to (mostly) forget his intention to cut back on the promiscuous aetherizing. Leaving wolf-boy to watch the doings, he shot free of his body, utterly clear-headed and distracted for only a little while by the first tender, effulgent pinks and golds of morning. Then, recalling his errand, he gave himself a mental shake and was plunging through the wards protecting Casa Summers. He’d been lawfully invited: the wards let him through.  
  
When he stopped, he was in the basement, hovering over the card table on which the athame and the remaining spell components were laid out--trying to suss out what had gone wrong.  
  
Was the fault in the materials, the spell, or the procedure?  
  
When he tried to lift one hand-written page to check the one underneath, he discovered the frustrating downside of being immaterial: he couldn’t touch anything. His fingers just passed through, the same as he’d come through the roof and the intervening floors. Stood to reason, once he considered it, but that didn’t make him any happier about it.  
  
Naturally, he couldn’t lift the athame, either. Its hollow haft was open, ready for the offering--just as he’d left it. But the little knife had been…wakened. Spike felt as though it was considering him accusingly, with a smug, sullen _I won’t and you can’t make me!_ flavor. He didn’t know how he knew. He didn’t smell, see, or hear the impression. It was simply _there_ to senses he didn’t yet know how to put names to. _Grokked_ it, then--as good a word as any, he supposed.  
  
It was personal, this defiance, this rejection. Little bastard of a knife didn’t sodding _like_ him. So maybe all the parts had been correct, but the athame was silently telling him to blow it out his ear. ‘Cause he was a vamp, maybe. Vamps and magic mostly didn’t get on. If so, he was screwed, and his whole idea of making a weapon that could be effective on the aetherial plane…a weapon that could stand against Fudo…was down the tubes.  
  
But maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it’d just been the wrong offering.  
  
He’d settled on the littlest finger on his right hand--the one he’d miss least, the one that wouldn’t cripple him up much while it healed. The thing had blown up the instant he’d begun to cut, after all.  
  
Maybe he’d considered his own comfort too much. Maybe only a true sacrifice--something that _would_ goddam cripple him--was what was called for, proportional to the power he wanted back from the athame.  
  
He found the fingers of his right hand wrapped protectively around his left thumb.  
  
He made them unfold.  
  
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you even think about it.”  
  
Startled, he looked around and it was Joyce--Buffy’s mum. And Dawn’s, after a fashion, too. He blurted, “What the hell are you doing here?”  
  
Showing him a stern expression, Joyce Summers folded her arms. She was all silver-shimmery and semi-transparent. She demanded, “And where else should I be?”  
  
“Oh. You’re a ghost.”  
  
“Bingo. And it’s just no end of frustration, let me tell you. I tried and tried to get through to Dawn, but she thought I was the First. And as to Buffy,” Joyce added, with an eye-roll, rotating in a floaty way to face the far end of the basement, “just forget it. I can’t compete with Slayer dreams. And awake, she doesn’t see me at all!”  
  
“It’s her aura. All in tatters, it is,” Spike replied, drifting alongside, the both of them contemplating the figure almost lost in the huge bed.  
  
She’d come back, Spike realized. Even though the basement probably still stank (he couldn’t tell) and she knew there was next to no chance that, having stormed out, he’d slink back before daybreak, Buffy had crawled under the duvet and cranked the electric mattress pad way up to 10 so everything would be all warm for him whenever he staggered in. Because it was her place now, that he’d set up for her. Their place, really. And even lonesome in the big bed, she wouldn’t sleep anyplace else.  
  
Feelings weren’t the same on the aetherial plane. You felt the same things, sure, but at a distance. Like emotions turned into ideas and you considered them, all cool and deliberate, not caught up blind in them like the usual.  
  
Except now. Finding Buffy there, Spike wanted to curl down inside her. He wanted to make the ragged edges of old pain all smooth and golden, the way he felt they should be. He wanted her to lift out of the body so he could take her careening high, to see the clear, crisp Sunnydale of the mind, everything bathed and revealed in its hurtless light.  
  
Without thought, he reached out…and his hand disappeared into her shoulder. Without contact. Without touching. He pulled his hand back quickly.  
  
“Sometimes, I just want to shake her,” Joyce confessed. “Or hug her. Doesn’t matter, I can’t do either. But with things so upset, I just don’t feel ready to…be anywhere else. Go wherever it is that ghosts go….”  
  
“Heaven, innit?”  
  
“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”  
  
“Buffy has.”  
  
“Really? So that’s why I couldn’t find her! I looked and looked but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I thought once Dawn called me, and I tried to go, but my body didn’t fit right anymore, somehow, and I didn’t want her to see me that way, so I thought better of it. So. Spike. If that’s the best you can do, don’t even bother. About the little knife there,” she explained, gesturing at the card table in response to his blank and slightly indignant stare.  
  
Having drawn himself up and lifted his chin, Spike met Joyce’s eyes and deflated, bending his head. “It’s me, right? ‘Cause I’m a vamp. I’m not good enough.”  
  
“It’s…inappropriate. The fit isn’t right between the intention and the execution. But that doesn’t mean there’s no merit to the idea,” Joyce added quickly. “The offering will, well, offer itself. And when the fit is right, you’ll know.”  
  
She was just trying to make him feel better about the spell going all pear-shaped on him. Amused Angel and had Rupert snickering but no use beyond that except to make him look a right prat.  
  
He wanted solace.  
  
He wanted Buffy.  
  
Even though he couldn’t touch, he flowed down beside her into the warmth he couldn’t feel, into the wonderful Buffysmell he couldn’t smell, imagining her slow, sleeping heartbeat he couldn’t hear. He felt something, though: when he’d been quiet awhile, he could feel her aura, her life energies--where they were smooth, and where they were ragged, broken, and hurting. He snuggled down over one of the hurting places and petted it slowly, steadily, in much the same half-awake way he’d stroke her arm, or a breast, in the drowsy aftermath of loving.  
  
He wasn’t thinking about Joyce, so he didn’t notice when she left.  
  
The next he knew, he was rousing, still mostly drunk, in a large sewer pipe, with wolf-boy (who he hazily recalled had fetched his boots and a shirt, obliging as a valet) still keeping patient watch, so that was all right. Oz offered a cell phone, and it took Spike a minute to think what to do with it since he mostly relied on the speed dials. Since it wasn’t his phone, he had to make his mind cough up the number, then dizzily make his finger push the right tiny buttons in the right order.  
  
“Who is this?” came Dawn’s suspicious voice.  
  
“Just me. Let me in through the tunnel, Bit. Lost track of the time.”  
  
“It’s ten freaking o’clock in the morning, if you want to know!”  
  
“Yeah, well.” Surveying the curved slimy walls, he saw a mark at a junction and knew where he was. “Be there in about five minutes. Or more like ten,” he amended, staggering to his feet.  
  
“Bike’s parked in the street, right above,” Oz commented with an upward glance.  
  
Spike thought a moment, then pulled the keys out of his pocket and handed them over. “’F you dump her, I’ll take skin in exchange,” he warned.  
  
Oz showed a small, down-pulled smile, not seeming much troubled by the threat.  
  
As Oz went toward the ladder at the junction, Spike turned and started slowly along the walkway, drawing a hand along the wall to keep from stumbling into the sludge. Knuckles scraped and a few lame places, so he guessed he’d got himself into a fight someplace along the line. Even with some bangs and bruises, it was good to be back in the body, though. He’d quit yearning after the astral plane. Gone off it, somehow. Probably for the best, considering.  
  
**********  
  
Willow was in the hall talking to Oz (standing with downcast eyes, not saying much, but that was Oz, so achingly familiar, so awkwardly comfortable, and he _might_ have known what spell Spike had been trying to cast, the spell-go-boom one, at least that’d been Willow’s excuse for accosting Oz when he slouched in the front door a minute or two after the noise of the arriving bike cut off, and he seemed to do a lot of that these days, slouch and look aside, anyplace but at her, except when he thought she wasn’t looking, and his aura so shaded brown and wistful though he didn’t say anything about the them-that-had-been and course neither did she, it would have been too sad, she being so conspicuously totally 100% gay now, so she was just asking him about what Spike might have said, totally good reason, not personal at all) when Dawn came banging up the basement stairs bent and turned half backward to tell off Spike, climbing and then arriving behind her.  
  
Spike looked mussed and…exhilarated, Willow judged. Not like last night. Well, that was Spike, wasn’t it? Things passed off him easily, once he’d blown up and wrecked everything in reach, which fortunately hadn’t been here for a change. They were all wound a bit too tightly, what with the Fudo avoidage and the staying in the house day after day and the not knowing when they’d be leaving and Christmas so close, not that Willow cared about that but Buffy did, angsting in the kitchen, making lists for Oz and Giles (the only ones who could leave without risking the enormousness that was Fudo) of things to fetch for the holiday festivities nobody really cared about but Buffy but, well, Buffy. Any major holiday to her was a Sacred Duty, to prove that nothing had changed when in fact everything had.  
  
Not so much bouncy, Spike, as intent, anticipatory. Ignoring Dawn’s tirade, he immediately located Buffy in the kitchen, his vast, flailing aura preceding him and wrapping around her like wind-driven flames.  
  
“Not now,” Buffy said, irritably shrugging him off and moving a little way around the kitchen island, intent on her list.  
  
No need to be asking Oz when Spike himself was there to be cross-examined: Willow moved into the kitchen doorway, Oz and Dawn (wanting to finish dressing Spike down) behind her.  
  
“Won’t take long,” Spike was wheedling, making puppy eyes, reaching out, but Buffy avoided the hand that would undoubtedly have pulled her into an embrace. “Ten minutes. Couple hours, maybe.”  
  
They’d made one full circuit of the island, Buffy avoiding, Spike pursuing in tentative lunges.  
  
“Spike, not now. Can’t you see I’m busy? You know how close Christmas is and I have nothing, nothing ready! Mom would be so disappointed. I don’t even have a fricking _tree!_ No!” Again, Buffy slipped aside and eluded him, gave him her back but obviously not losing an ounce of her Slayer awareness of a vampire intent on closing with her because every time he reached, she was gone. Like the coordinated dance they did putting away groceries, or sparring, or fighting, each completely aware of the other’s motions without even needing to look. Only not, of course, since it was a dance of avoidance.  
  
Ducking and dodging, circling, Buffy went on, “Not that I expect you to care. Or even understand. Just leave me alone, will you? Is that too much to ask? One fricking peaceful hour when you’re not bugging me, or blowing things up, or laying there like a stone and off in your damn astral realm? Go play with yourself. I’m busy. _Some_ of us have to be responsible around here, not ducking out every chance with the attention span of a gnat! Geez, don’t you ever think about anything else?”  
  
Buffy wheeled, both fists braced on the island-top, list in one hand and pencil in the other--a pencil she was now holding point-up, like a stake. Spike had stopped too, hands flat on the island. They regarded each other across it.  
  
Spike flicked a glance at the doorway--Willow, Oz, Dawn, and now Angel looming behind, Willow noticed--and then replied, “Isn’t like that. Not altogether,” in an embarrassed mutter.  
  
And it was true: instead of the usual blazing crimson of Tantric energies, his aura was shot through with hazy blues and greys--a sort of Cirrus aura like a summer sky with filmy clouds moving fast, high aloft. Buffy’s, by contrast, was sullen slate, with yellow glints of annoyance. Tight against her body contours, it walled her in.  
  
“Not doing that anymore,” Spike said earnestly. “Need…to be here. With you.” Another glance at the door, aware of his audience. “C’mon downstairs. We’ll talk. Only talk. Just a little while.”  
  
He reached toward her face, palm cupped to lay against her cheek, thumb wide to set against her protesting lips. She slapped his hand away, eyes flashing. The two motions almost too quick to see but the result immediate: Spike’s aura just flicked out. Died. Not really, Willow corrected--it just went still, and tight as a sheen of oil: a normal, minimal vamp aura.  
  
Willow began uneasily, “Buffy--” as Spike dipped his head in a moment’s thought, then turned, pushed through them, and disappeared back into the basement with Dawn in startled hot pursuit, calling after him.  
  
Angel murmured, not quietly enough, “Drama queen.”  
  
Elbows on the island, pencil reversed and meditatively bitten, Buffy was again absorbed in her list. She glanced up, annoyed, when Willow tapped her arm. “What is it _now?_ Will, I’m never gonna get done--”  
  
“You think that was nothing. It wasn’t. It was something.”  
  
Buffy hitched a shoulder. “He’ll get over it. I may be his fricking cow, the way vamps view things, but I’m not on call 24/7. I have a life. I have priorities. I’m not all over the place, leaping into whatever comes into my head from second to second. I can concentrate! That is, whenever I’m not getting interrupted--”  
  
Trudging glumly back from the basement, Dawn accused, “He’s gone again, if anybody cares. Thanks _so_ much, Buffy! Why’d you pick now to go all Ice Queen instead of the other eight thousand daily opportunities? Oh, wait--that was your first chance today to dump on him in front of everybody. You didn’t want to waste it. Right.”  
  
“I _didn’t_ dump on him! It’s just…. He gets so….”  
  
“Horny?” Dawn suggested sweetly. “Lonesome? Needy? Hoping not to be treated like dirt? Well, a jolly Ho Ho Ho to you, too. You sure know how to spread the holiday cheer, Buffy! I’ll go make myself useful: sort the surviving ornaments. That’s assuming we can get a tree up before New Years. Geez!” After a frustrated flap of her arms, Dawn exited to the basement, slamming the door behind her.  
  
“Buffy….” Willow said again, but Buffy snatched a down vest off the pegs by the back door and escaped to the porch, shutting the door with a controlled _click_ that was a slam in all except volume.  
  
“Think I’ll use the front door,” Oz remarked to himself.  
  
“Yeah: a farce would need more doors. So everybody could slam their own,” Willow agreed, drifting along beside him. “But…aren’t you tired? You’re not obliged to babysit him every minute.”  
  
“You were right: something changed. I smelled it. Curious,” Oz said with a hint of a smile and worried eyes, “what it might have been. It’s my mandate,” he explained, “from the Powers to get this show on the road. Don’t want to be missing a boxcar when we pull out. Or an engine.” Pulling on a cap, he was zipping his jacket as he went down the front steps and jogged toward the street--taking his van, apparently.  
  
The outside air was frosty. Willow shut the door.  
  
**********  
  
Finally Buffy finished the list of super-secret presents--ironically she’d been working on presents for Spike when he’d made such a pest of himself: he might not care about Christmas, but it was the first since he’d become part of the household and her acknowledged consort, so presents were absolutely due--and got something like lunch together. Since Oz was missing, it seemed Spike wasn’t back either.  
  
Middle of the day. He’d probably laired up someplace to sleep. No big: she’d cell him at sunset. He could sulk to her directly then. Get it out of his system.  
  
Over tuna sandwiches with potato chips and the proper excellent kosher pickles on the side, she asked Willow uncomfortably, “So what was the big hairy deal, before? It’s not like I never said No before. Sometimes, he’s the La Brea tarpits and superglue combined. Or something.” She could feel her face heating at coming even that close to referring to her private life. Sex-with-Spike life. And him propositioning her right in front of everybody, when everybody would _know,_ all insane-o and blatant. She’d promised to back him up, but that had been something entirely else. She still couldn’t believe he’d done it. Dumbass!  
  
“Not now.” Willow threw a meaningful glance at Angel, conspicuously trying to be inconspicuous while fixing mugs of blood for himself and Mike.  
  
Angel was shy about that whereas Spike dumped disgusting things in and loudly slurped and smacked his lips over the result. When he’d still relied on the bagged, that is. Now he had her, he’d quit the bagged stuff entirely. Buffy reflexively rubbed the mark on her neck, expecting the usual tingle and heightened awareness. Nothing. Did she try the wrong side? Quickly she touched the other side, that should be Angel’s mark. As though he’d felt the touch, Angel at once turned and looked at her, wide-eyed and startled, and she was so freaked by that she didn’t notice if she’d had any reaction. Bending her head, she surreptitiously tried again, one side and then the other. Nothing. Just old scars.  
  
Cracking a crisp pickle, pinkie delicately outstretched, Dawn commented, “Not exactly subtle, no. But then the windows rattling and the thumping and the yelling--”  
  
“Dawn!”  
  
“--was hardly covert ops, you know. I was sooo glad when Xander finished sound-proofing the basement and you guys moved down there! I don’t really need a vicarious sex life, you know.” Pausing for an introspective frown, Dawn lowered the pickle from on high and crunched.  
  
Xander. Buffy hadn’t talked to him in weeks. Way before Giles’ arrival. Before the excursion to Terminal Beach, even. Buffy remembered feeling guilty for not inviting him and Anya along, not that she’d known where they were going, but that hadn’t prevented her from feeling guilty for not including them once she was there. And the three SITs. And the cousins--the half dozen or so remaining vamps who acknowledged Mike’s authority. None of them knew anything about what was going on, and that was wrong. She should call a meeting….  
  
But all of them could run errands. Choose a tree. Get the presents (she’d trust Xander with the plastic or Oz of course but nobody else). She had a whole network of potential help she somehow had pretty much forgotten.  
  
A fullscale Christmas party, then. With everybody. The cousins were reasonably well-behaved and if there was liquor, they’d like it. And Spike would keep them in line if Mike couldn’t yet, though it seemed Mike was better, not that she’d paid much attention. She should start a list….  
  
“Huh?” she said, when Willow nudged her and waved fingers in front of her face. She found the kitchen empty except for the two of them.  
  
“I think Dawn’s right: it’s like the napkins.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“When he came in he was pretty serene, like he’d processed the spell that didn’t work. Wasn’t bothered about it anymore. With a big ol’ yen on for you, which,” (Willow shrugged, smiling) “is not exactly unusual. Not that I was looking. Well, I was but only because I’d been noticing Oz’s aura, so I saw Spike’s when he came in, and it was pretty normal for him anyway, all Northern Lights shimmery, not that I’ve ever seen the Northern Lights except on PBS--”  
  
“How much coffee have you had, Will?”  
  
“Enough to finish ordering all my presents. I may be Wicca but I’m not immune to social conventions. Besides, we all need an upper. Wanna know what I got Xander?”  
  
“But you’ve been home.”  
  
“I let magic fingers do the walking. Internet,” Willow explained, happily waggling fingers again, as if on a keyboard. “Even wangled free rush delivery.”  
  
“Oh.” Buffy could have done that. It hadn’t even occurred to her.  
  
“I made a fresh pot, though. Want some?” Willow asked, sliding off her stool.  
  
“Nope. I don’t need caffeine to contemplate the depth of my dumbth. I bet even Giles thought to order over the Internet.”  
  
“Probably. He does e-mail and even occasionally Googles, according to him. Anyway, like I said, here’s Spike all reaching and hoping and flicker-glowy, and then you slap him--”  
  
“Pushed his hand away,” Buffy corrected, glowering.  
  
“It was a slap, Buffy. And his candle went out. Aura down to next to nothing, just a regular vamp aura. Couldn’t channel sunlight with it like that, I bet. Couldn’t access the astral plane if he tried. Major shut-down.”  
  
Buffy set her nibbled-at half sandwich down. “Will, sometimes we do open warfare, with bruises and marks afterward, just for fun. A little push like that, that’s nothing.”  
  
“No. It was something, to get a reaction like that. I think Dawn’s right--something just snapped, like about the napkins. It wasn’t about napkins at all, so this wasn’t just about the slap. I imagine he’d react about that way if we disinvited him, locked him out. That’s all I’m saying, Buffy--that it was something.”  
  
Buffy rested her forehead on her propped fists. Spike was such a prima donna, sometimes. Such a drama queen, blowing up over nothing. Although he hadn’t exploded, hadn’t even twitched, since Angel’s arrival. On what, for Spike, passed for best behavior since then. She’d even seen him with the laptop, working on the translation, a time or two, although without the glasses he was too vain to wear when Giles or Angel might see him, so he’d probably ended up with an eyestrain headache, though she didn’t recall his complaining about one.  
  
Maybe he was due. Maybe it was no more than that. Probably. Though a dignified exit through the basement passage hardly seemed to constitute an explosion….  
  
“I’ll cell him later,” Buffy said around a bite of sandwich. “Let him whine and rant as much as he likes that way, instead of in front of everybody. Isn’t it weird to have to leave the house to get a single scrap of privacy?”  
  
“Is that a rhetorical question?”  
  
Buffy shrugged. “So: about Oz. What’s his aura like, and what are you doing observing it?”  
  
Willow looked uncomfortable, making twisted origami out of a napkin. “It’s mostly like a forest. Greens and browns...and quiet. The wolf of it, I guess. It’s always been like that. Pretty steady state, actually.”  
  
“And you’re checking on it why?”  
  
“He’s different. We’re different. But…not. It’s complicated.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Buffy, carefully casual, neutral. She understood what a big hairy deal it was to admit things out loud and in public. It meant you had to acknowledge them to yourself. And the fastest way to drive Willow into full Oz retreat would be to try to make her say old times there were not forgotten. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.  
  
Since she and Spike were both unobtrusively hoping for renewed Willow-Oz sparkage, they kept completely mum about it, to not jinx it. Spike was always so insightful about such things. Strange he could be such a dumbass in other ways. Like about napkins: she’d finally remembered the incident.  
  
"Will, how come you know about the napkins? You weren't even there!"  
  
Willow blinked at her. "You were sitting right there when Dawn told me about it. I think you need caffeine!"  
  
“No, thanks," Buffy responded, as Willow actually _did_ get up and go to the coffee maker. "S’cuse me.”  
  
Hustling to the hall table, Buffy scooped up her cellphone and pushed the quick-dial preset for Spike. After five rings, she held the phone away from her ear to find out if she could hear the answering ringing anywhere within the house. (Even though Spike’s phone was pocket-sized, he forgot it more often than not.) She even leaned into the basement for a minute. After thirty rings, nothing. Not even an automated voice announcing that his phone wasn’t in service.  
  
Asleep, then. Probably. And Oz keeping an eye on him, so nothing could happen.  
  
Did Oz have a cellphone? If not, she should see that he got one. She should add that to the equipment list.  
  
**********  
  
As Dawn toted the stacked ornament boxes into the front room, Mike started to get up creakily to help. When she waved him off with the flap of an elbow, he subsided carefully into the big chair as she laid the boxes on the couch and then on the floor.  
  
It wasn’t right to depend on him to do things all the time, just because he was willing. Wanted to, even. Not when otherwise she was always pushing him away, shutting him out. Like Buffy had done to Spike. That had to hurt.  
  
She absolutely didn’t want to hurt him. Didn’t know how to stop, not that he ever complained--just looked straight at her with those wide grey eyes, wolf eyes or maybe an Alsatian, but not pleading puppy eyes. Just seeing across the distance, recognizing it and still looking….  
  
Spinning, she flopped down next to the chair, leaning and reaching over the broad arm to wrap fingers around Mike’s arm, that she didn’t have to be so careful about joggling anymore, blurting, “You should just go. As soon as you can, you should get clear of this. Of us. You got hurt on our account--might have dusted. But it’s--”  
  
“Didn’t, though. Spike and my Sire, they took good care of me. And you helped. All past, Dawn. Almost all healed. No need for you to bother about it.”  
  
“That’s not the point!”  
  
“All right,” he responded amiably. “What is the point, then?”  
  
“This business…about Quor’toth, it’s--”  
  
“About Angel’s son,” Mike interrupted calmly, and Dawn goggled at him. “Angel told me,” Mike explained. “To be sure I knew he had a son and I wasn’t it. And he had get, and I wasn’t that either, though Spike’s his only on one bounce and he made me direct. Didn’t want me thinking things were how they’re not. That I’m anything to him but a responsibility, because Spike made a fuss about it and he needs to stay on Spike’s good side right now to get anything done.”  
  
“Like telling you you’re adopted and shouldn’t expect anything but scraps?” Dawn demanded, indignant on Mike’s behalf.  
  
“Doesn’t matter, so long as the scraps keep coming. Scraps like that. He’s cut me off now, seems like. Figures I can do without. Likely I can. Can do without most things. Don’t need much.” Lifting the mug in his other hand, Mike drank down the last of the blood, then bent to set the cup safely aside on the floor. “Spike’s right,” he commented absently, sagging into the chair, head tipped back and eyes shut. “Pig blood, that’s swill. Only had it a couple times before, never want to again. Maybe tonight I’ll be well enough to get out.”  
  
“And hunt,” Dawn supplied tightly, and got a nod in reply. Mike had never been coy with her about that side of his life.  
  
“Maybe he’d go out with me, see I don’t mess up too bad. Or maybe Spike would, though he’s mostly left me alone since this.” He sketched a thumb diagonally from shoulder to hip. “Didn’t want to be an impediment between me and my Sire, mostly, I think. Let us get on however we could. Hope so, anyway. Hope he don’t feel I’m the impediment, shrugged me off the first chance he got….”  
  
“Oh, no! You shouldn’t think things like that!”  
  
Mike blinked at her sleepily. “Things are how they are. Shouldn’t take things for granted. Don’t need much and got enough to keep going, I guess.”  
  
Dawn was indignant at his lack of indignation, at how patiently he accepted the unacceptable. “That’s what I mean: you should go. Do your own vamp things, like you used to, not just trail around after us. It’s not right. It’s not fair. This isn’t your fight. Nobody asked you to get involved.”  
  
“Nobody said I couldn’t, neither. Until they do, this is what makes sense to me. You want me gone, Dawn?” Mike asked with calm directness, like he didn’t care about the answer, either way…or he already knew what the answer was.  
  
“I think…. I think you should _want_ to go. Be sick of us by now. All of us. The Slayer that tolerates you, the Sire that barely acknowledges you and the almost-sire who’s a genuine asshole sometimes and grudges accepting help from anybody _all_ the time, and the Imperious Key, who won’t, who can’t--”  
  
“Hush, don’t fret yourself about it. I understand.”  
  
“Understand _what?_ Because I don’t!”  
  
“Yes, you do. It’s what you told Spike, and he told me, a while ago: you can be a girl, and go with girl ways, mortal ways. Or you can be the Key and live forever. Can’t do both, though I know it tugs at you, having to give up the one or the other. You can be Spike’s, or you can be mine. But not both. I understand that, finally, and I’m all right with it. Right enough, anyways.” He patted her hand consolingly and she wanted to hit him. Either that or bawl all over him. Mike went on, “There’s noplace to go to, anymore, that I want. There’s only _away._ And why would I want that? Until I’m stopped, I’ll be with you. You don’t know--might come in handy, a time or two. Like with Fudo.”  
  
“That? That wasn’t _handy!_ That was suicidal! You nearly got killed!”  
  
“Bought enough time for the others to get there, deal with him. Did what I could and what was needful. Spike and my Sire, both, they thought I done good enough to go to the trouble of fetching me back from the edge. Got a feed or so from you, too, I recall.”  
  
“That wasn’t reward, that was me being so scared you were just gonna dust and blow away on the wind, never any Michael any more, never no more--” Leaning and reaching, Dawn hugged him as hard as she dared, likely harder than she should, but he never complained, wrapping arms around her and resting his cheek against hers.  
  
“And all this to convince me I should leave. Going about it wrong, I think.” He kissed her forehead and drew a long, savoring breath against her hair, then held her a little away by the shoulders. “Can’t help with the fence you’re balanced on, Dawn. Can only watch and hope all goes well for you. Things are how they are. Don’t have to concern yourself about me. What’s lacking, between us, is not the most important thing. Only seems so to you. Not important to me at all.”  
  
“Yeah: Sue’s not important!” Dawn accused.  
  
“She’s not. And she knows she’s not. And doesn’t much care, because vamps generally don’t. It’s all convenience and…who’s on top.” Mike gave her a smile as she made a wry face. “Far as my pack’s concerned, she’s on top, and that’s enough to make her happy enough. She’s not the center of the turning world, though. Doesn’t know enough, feel enough, to want that. She’s not jealous of you, just likes to dig the point in a little because she knows she can get your goat that way. No need for you to be jealous of her, neither. She has no goat worth the getting. No goat you want, except to have her not have it, and that’s not very nice, is it?”  
  
“Sometimes I’m not very nice,” Dawn admitted, folding against his chest, so solid and uncluttered by biological creaks and bangs. So unnatural and steadfast. “So have all my arguments convinced you to leave?”  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
**********  
  
After trying and failing to make contact with Spike’s cellphone while wandering around the house collecting items to toss into a white wash, Buffy froze on the stairs holding a single grimy white sock. “Will?” she called upstairs, feeling the elevator drop of near-certain suspicion. “What day is it?”  
  
“Today?” Willow’s voice responded from her room.  
  
“Yes, today!” Buffy simultaneously rolled her eyes, thought swear words, and confirmed with a wincing glance at the bottom third of the front window that it was already dark outside, complete with street lights. “Is it Monday or Tuesday?”  
  
“Tuesday, I think…. Yeah, Tuesday.”  
  
OMG, OMG, it was _class_ night!  
  
Skidding into her bedroom, Buffy wrestled into her least wrinkly set of sweats. Twisting up her hair enough to secure it with a scrunchy, she scuffed into sneaks while clambering down the stairs, holding to the rail two-handed, yelling for Dawn, who poked her face out of the den like some funhouse pop-out. Buffy nearly collided with her but skittered around at the last second. “Dawn, supper: order out, organize one of your messes, I don’t care. Or no: I’ll bring back Chinese!” she flung over her shoulder as she dashed for the SUV.  
  
“Buffy,” Dawn called anxiously from the porch, “should you be--”  
  
Belatedly recollecting Fudo, Buffy paused a second before jamming the ignition key determinedly home and screeching over the curb. If Fudo showed, she’d just lock all the doors and drive like a maniac, that’s all. Run red lights. Maybe break speed limits.  
  
The basic attacking-demons drill, in other words.  
  
But she’d found herself the most menacing thing on the street when she wheeled into the side lot of the Community Center and sprinted for the big font doors. Only twenty minutes late--maybe they’d waited. Maybe she could come up with some credible excuse instead of admitting she’d completely forgotten the Safety through Fitness course she taught twice a week and the twenty or so kids had paid actual money for and how could anybody expect her to keep everything straight, with all that was going on--  
  
Navigating the corridor, she braked to a breathless saunter at seeing the lights on in the exercise/dance room at the end; she stopped completely, dumbfounded, when she heard Spike’s voice from inside, through the open door.  
  
“--not exactly what you signed on for, right. But for those who want it easy, there’ll be the usual routine of jerks, easy throws, balance and stance practice. And those that are up for it, you might want to consider the contract escort service, like I said, and you can stop snickering anytime now, Candy. Not that sort of escort service. Paid protection. We’ve got off a bit late for Halloween and Christmas, but we might be able to put things together to cover the New Year’s do’s. Six would be a good number for that. You can let me or Anya know by Thursday, she’ll be putting together the business arrangements, goin’ to the Chamber of Commerce folk, and like that. Yeah--Anya. The lady at the Magic Box. See that a few more of your chums make it home without getting eaten. Jerome?” A pause while an indistinguishable question was asked. Spike responded, “Yeah--the heavy duty action. Patrolling. Thinking about that, a walk-along, anyway, but the girls here and the semi-reliable cousins, over there, for the actual fighting until I think somebody is fit to handle themselves ‘gainst whatever demons we run into that are more annoyance than dangerous. Not a one of you I’d risk yet against a Trisaps, whose basic strategy is to fall on you. All three hundred dripping pounds. And no, you do _not_ want to know what’s dripping, or from what. Or Hellhounds, we get a fair number of those in the cooler weather. They have their annual games just north of here, and a few spill over. Or-- Doris?” Another question. “Yeah, sure, the escorts will need some kind of uniform. Something simple, to start with. You want to take that on? You’re in beginning design. Well, that’s fine. Do up some sketches so I can check you ain’t put on twenty pounds of sparkly shit, tassels, Vatican Guard crap. Oh, you _so_ would!” Laughter. “Functional, yet stylish. Like the-- like Miss Elizabeth does. You can join us anytime, pet.”  
  
He’d heard her--her lone heartbeat out in the corridor. Or smelled her, maybe. As she stood in her grungy sweats, neither stylish nor very functional, wanting to disappear, Spike leaned out the doorway, took in the ensemble with a lifted eyebrow, and leaned back inside, commenting to the class, “Or you could take the utilitarian look: about halfway between ninja and jammies.”  
  
That was plainly her entrance line. Assuming the semi-panicked grin she kept specially for the class, she sidled in and made a small, nervous wave at the blur of faces before her.  
  
There seemed about the usual number. As Spike blessedly kept on talking, drawing the attention of the class away from her in his usual effortless hogging of any available spotlight, literal or figurative, Buffy found the blur resolving into actual known faces, some even with names. And about half the number were in the black-and-red of the colors--the three SITs, Amanda, Rona, and Kennedy; and seven vamps, the latter clustered off to the right, prudently out of striking distance but looking comfortable enough despite Sue and another fledge Buffy didn’t know lounging under the bright fluorescents in open game-face.  
  
Spike’s voice registered again, saying, “--Miss Elizabeth’s here, she’ll take you through your jerks and all, if she’s brought the pads. Or whatever she says. Candy, can you start a sign-up list for the escort business? There’s dosh goes with that, by the by. Let you know how much when we have a few bookings.”  
  
“And the patrols?” Candy asked brightly, the slut, with her artfully disarrayed waterfall topknot and garish purple spandex workout outfit Buffy sometimes suspected of being paint.  
  
Spike shrugged. “Can’t hurt, but ‘m not promising anything at this point. Don’t intend to get anybody more than cracked slightly crooked because dead is real ugly an’ causes talk. Ain’t that right, Sue.”  
  
“If you say so, Spike. I guess you’d know,” Sue responded cheerfully, as though unaware her snarling, snaggle-fanged game face was one of the more hideous examples. Maybe she really didn’t know, Buffy realized: no mirrors.  
  
Then she realized that Spike had eased into the hallway. That he was _leaving_.  
  
For a second she locked up, wild-eyed and frantically smiling. Then she lunged out into the corridor. Spike was nearly to the front doors, shrugging into his duster as he got a cigarette out for lighting.  
  
“Spike!” A strangled squeak. “Spike!” Sneakers squeaking on the shiny vinyl tile, she pounded down the corridor as he waited quizzically with his back holding the left-hand door open, all slinky black leather and casual. “Spike, we have to talk!”  
  
He waited a beat, conspicuously patient. “Due someplace now, pet. I’ll--”  
  
“No, now! How can we start the escort--”  
  
Something flickered a second in his eyes. Then he attended to lighting the cigarette. “ _Said_ I’m due someplace.” He clicked the lighter shut and put it away. “Got my business, and you got yours. All those downy chicks, waiting inside for you. Got them all warmed up for you, didn’t I? So you can take them through their tricks, all in good order.”  
  
“What’s this too cool for school act?”  
  
“ _Act_ ,” Spike repeated as though mulling the word, turning away, letting the door start to hiss shut. Buffy banged the metal frame with the heel of her hand, arm braced. But her nearly neglected responsibility to the class held her, as he’d known it would, the sneaky bastard.  
  
It galled her that he’d remembered the class, and she hadn’t. It galled her that he was going about his own business and abandoning her to hers instead of backing her up the way he was supposed to.  
  
Payback for her slapping him down, this morning? Maybe. He could be petty when he was ticked off.  
  
It didn’t feel like that, though. He was too aloof, too composed, to be secretly giggling inside at a well-executed _gotcha_.  
  
It was, as Willow claimed, _something_. But Buffy, who thought she knew all his moods, didn’t know this one and didn’t like it one bit.  
  
Poking head and shoulders out the door, pushing at tendrils of hair already escaping the scrunchy, she shouted after him, “Turn on your fricking phone!” and got an offhand, over-the-shoulder wave in reply, marked by the swinging coal of the cigarette.  
  
Thinking grimly _Later,_ followed immediately by the agreeable thought of rowdy make-up sex, Buffy trudged back up the corridor, her sneakers going _squeeka, squeeka, squeeka_ like a bad grocery cart.  
  
**********  
  
Standing on the sidewalk, Spike critically watched Mike get down from Oz’s van--a step and then a turn, one hand still cautiously on the doorframe, finding his balance. Not really up to being out on his own yet, and they all knew it.  
  
Leaning on the bench front seat to talk through the open door, Oz asked, “You want me to come with?”  
  
“You eat people?” Spike responded bluntly.  
  
“No. No, hardly ever,” Oz said, trying to make a joke of it.  
  
“Then you don’t want to come. We’ll manage. Swing back in an hour or so.”  
  
As Spike started off, Oz called, “What if Fudo--”  
  
Spike waved and said nothing, walking slow enough that Mike could fall in alongside.  
  
Mike wasn’t gonna admit he was worried about Fudo, but he was looking around in a guarded, slightly spooked way that didn’t go with hunting, so Spike volunteered, “No problem there. Fudo, that is. We came to an arrangement.”  
  
“What arrangement.”  
  
“Sort of ran into him in the pipes, about noontime,” Spike continued. “After I’d sent wolfboy off on an errand. Couldn’t neither of us get an advantage, so I made him a proposition. So far, nobody’s actually _done_ anything that’s harmed his precious Balance, so rightly he shouldn’t come after us until we do. Logical bloke. Idealist, I expect. Living by rules.” Spike tapped out a cigarette and lit it meditatively as they approached the hospital. He surveyed the tiers of lighted windows. “Offered him an advantage later if he’d hold off now, till we’d actually done something. So we have a sort of a truce going. Long as it holds, Fudo’s not a problem.”  
  
“What advantage.”  
  
“Not your concern, Michael. Keep your mind on what’s at hand.”  
  
As usual at St. Elizabeth’s, there were a couple of hospital staff--female: cleaning crew, by the smell, for all that they were muffled up in coats and scarves; anyway, Spike could hear their voices if there’d been any doubt--waiting in the lighted bus shelter. One apiece: seemed about right.  
  
But as Spike and Mike joined them, a bus pulled up and the two chatting women got on, oblivious of their escape. The two vampires traded a glance. Then Spike led off to the hospital itself.  
  
St. Elizabeth’s was in Mike’s hunting territory, but Spike knew it pretty well. Continuing to take the lead, he took the first set of stairs next to the bank of elevators. As Mike eased the door shut, Spike paused on the landing, listening for anyone moving in the stairwell. Finding all clear, he headed down toward the blood bank.  
  
In his chipped days, he’d had an arrangement with Russell, a night shift worker--the occasional blood bag in exchange for a consideration, generally money, but the odd suck job hadn’t been out of the question when he was completely skint. Been all toplofty with him, Russell had, desperation being hard to hide. After the first few times, Russell had been smug besides, figuring Spike needed him too much to do anything permanent, not knowing that the chip kept Spike from taking more than what was freely offered. Spike didn’t need that sort of help anymore, so he figured tonight was payback.  
  
“Well, look who’s here!” Russell commented genially, turning from a computer as Spike entered. “Ain’t seen you in--”  
  
That was all he had time for before Mike swept in and took him.  
  
When the sounds of struggle stopped, Spike quit loading his duster pockets with slippery, thawing bags from the outdated bin, directing over his shoulder, “That’s enough.” When, predictably, Mike didn’t leave off, Spike pried him away, hitting him a few times in the process--short, sharp punches. Mike folded pretty fast. Didn’t yet have the endurance to take on one of his own crew, let alone Spike, which was why Spike had kept them separate tonight--so Mike wouldn’t have to face a challenge less benevolent than Spike’s. Not that Spike didn’t enjoy it, putting the pup down--just didn’t do more than what was needful.  
  
Unconscious Russell still had a pulse, which was likely more than he deserved, but Spike was practicing moderation these days.  
  
“Never know,” he said, dragging Russell nearer the door, “when it might come in handy, having an inside man in a blood bank. Got to be thrifty. Think ahead.”  
  
“Hell with that,” Mike responded, arising heavily, holding the glaringly white counter for support. “I want it all.”  
  
Arranging Russell into a pose of attempted escape, Spike replied absently, “‘Course you do. But you can manage if you try hard enough. Turned that new Dalton, didn’t you?” He conceded, “S’pose your control’s not the best just now. But you hunt with me, you abide by my rules.”  
  
Russell would do, he judged. Having jerked the door off its top hinge, further simulating a break-in and attack, Spike collected another handful of outdated bags, then picked up the phone. Dialing the number of Security from memory, he said, “Help!” in a strangled voice and let the phone drop.  
  
He and Mike were down the hall and into the morgue before the elevator decanted a couple of Security blokes. The morgue held nothing of interest but had its own entrance and its own elevator. The elevator had a keypad control, letters/numbers like a phone, and the combination was DEATH3210: bit of gallows humor that nobody had bothered to change in at least five years. Spike tapped in the code. When he’d herded Mike inside, he hit the button for six: the cancer ward. Go high while Security was going low, find a couple-few unfortunates practically on their last breath anyway, give them a soft send-off and satisfy Mike’s hunger for taking the last, the death.  
  
Spike could do without that now, and the blood was none the worse for the disease, except that it tasted peppery, a bit. Get himself fed too while he was about it, since Russell wouldn’t have survived any additional drain.  
  
Didn’t want to face Buffy again in blood debt and her likely all roused and sparky with him, smelling all kinds of delicious. Likely he’d give in to temptation, not hold to what he’d decided. Slayer, she’d need all her strength from here on, since he’d seen the Balance clear and known there was no place for him on the Quor’toth expedition. More useful for him to see to things here. Build on what they’d begun, like the class and the escort service and the patrolling.  
  
She wouldn’t like it and probably would fight admitting it, that he was no more use to her, not with Quor’toth. A liability, even, given a mixed contingent of humans and vampires for whom it was impossible to pack food for more than a day or so. And never in this world or any other would Buffy OK the vamps living off the land, so to speak.  
  
Angel, with his fucking regimen of pigs’ blood, hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. Neither had Buffy, obviously. But Spike had, and resolved himself to the only available alternative: he’d stay behind.  
  
It’d been enough to satisfy Fudo, for the moment.  
  
That would prevent Dawn from going, given Spike’s promise; and in turn hold Mike in place and therefore any of his crew he might otherwise have bullied into volunteering, once he was up to such again. Keep the vamp contingent to Angel, which would probably please Angel all to hell and be more manageable.  
  
And Buffy wouldn’t always have to be looking over her shoulder for Fudo, could move freely to make whatever preparations were necessary—for fucking Christmas or whatever.  
  
A good bargain. An acceptable truce, however little Spike liked it.  
  
The poverty ward on the cancer unit was pretty much wall-to-wall beds. It stank of pain, diseased organs, death, fear--a banquet to vamp senses. Mike sailed right in, an angel of death in bluejeans and a black T-shirt with the sentiment _Hire the Handicapped_ with a picture of a grinning legless guy speeding along in a wheelchair.  
  
Less avid, slightly afflicted by pity, Spike decided the bagged he’d collected would do for him well enough. Not that he cared all that much, so long as it was human and not completely gone off. And by the smell, most of the terminal patients were doped completely off their heads: he didn’t need that distraction. Leave Mike that fun, then—no sense in the both of them getting too happy-stupid to get away in good order. Have to be sensible, responsible now. Think ahead; do what was needful.  
  
Both vampires began feeding.


	9. Cold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nan considered this a partial, incomplete chapter, but it is all there is.

As Buffy descended the stairs the next morning, toweling her hair after a long, luxurious shower and thinking about all the things she had to get done for the party on Friday, she halted, hearing Dawn and Spike talking in the front room.  
  
He hadn’t come back at all last night. He’d turned his phone off. Still sulking, she’d concluded.  
  
She hadn’t decided how she should feel about that, which meant she felt annoyed and off-balance.  
  
Dawn was explaining, “--a bargain we made. He doesn’t come here when, well, he’s eaten somebody.”  
  
“That what it was, then.” Buffy could hear the shrug in Spike’s voice. “Just as well, then, I suppose. Ow! Leave off, Bit--”  
  
“Sorry, but it’s your own fault. Hold still.”  
  
“Not like it won’t mend on its own, day or so, doesn’t need tending--”  
  
Having adjusted the belt of her robe to a dependable tightness, Buffy sauntered the rest of the way down, flying casual.  
  
From the conversation, she’d expected to see Dawn tending the usual aftermath of a fight: skinned knuckles and the like. Instead, Dawn was kneeling on the couch next to Spike, intently slathering white cream on his very, very sunburned face that he turned in one direction, then another, irritably trying to avoid her attentions without actually stopping her, or leaving.  
  
_He has no defenses,_ Buffy found herself thinking. From Dawn, anyway, he’d put up with just about anything…which was more than he’d do for Buffy, she thought rancorously.  
  
First, she laughed: he was red as a beet. Then that was overwhelmed by a rush of concern because the conspicuous damage could have been so much worse. Stupid vampire!  
  
Leaning against the door arch, Buffy commented, “Overdid a little, did we?”  
  
Spike’s head whipped around, streaked with cream and bright as a tomato: belatedly noticing her. His eyebrows were singed off, and the front of his hair had burned away, too. As his face began to change, he retorted, “Think this is funny, do you?”  
  
“Quit that,” Dawn directed, laying two stiff, greasy fingers on the bridge of his nose, where the flesh was sliding into the corrugations of the vampire mask. “You’re only making it worse.”  
  
“It itches,” Spike grumbled, turning away from them both, now in full sullen game-face.  
  
Persisting, Dawn fingered up more cream from an indigo jar. “Spike, you got to quit doing this. First, explosions and smoke, and now _this--_ ”  
  
As Dawn’s hand reached toward his throat, his patience broke and he bolted--into the hall and then up the stairs, three at a bound.  
  
The sisters traded a look of accord that commented on stupid, stubborn vampires that forgot they were flammable. On the floor above, a door slammed. As Buffy swung around to the stairs in slower but relentless pursuit, Dawn called, “Don’t let Angel see.”  
  
Or Spike would never hear the end of it: Buffy nodded understanding, still trying to decide what to feel toward her wayward vampire.  
  
The shower was running. Buffy eased through the bathroom door. Although she shut it quietly behind her, he heard, smelled, _knew,_ the way he nearly always did, and snarled from behind the undulant shower curtain, “Let me be. Took me by surprise, didn’t it? But not the first time I got singed and likely not the last neither. Nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about. Expect it looks worse than it is, Bit just goes all bossy--”  
  
“You get hurt,” Buffy interrupted calmly, unbelting the robe and letting it fall, stepping over the mound of his discarded clothes, “and I inspect the damage. It’s how we do, remember?”  
  
She pushed aside the curtain, got into the shower, and immediately regretted it: the water was frigid.  
  
“Somebody used up all the hot,” Spike commented pointedly, his back to her, hands braced against the wall and his head bent against the tiles under the full of the spray.  
  
His clothes had provided an instant’s protection: long enough for him to dive away from the full sunlight. But his back was mottled with burns, too--from shoulders to shins. It had, Buffy realized, been a near thing.  
  
She touched the back of his neck and felt him flinch. “You know what will help that.” Actually, she was surprised he hadn’t gone for her the second she came into the bathroom.  
  
“No. No need. I’m fed up well enough, don’t need that.”  
  
“Maybe I _do,_ ” she countered, tugging carefully at his shoulder, trying to make him turn. “The bite’s gone numb, Spike. I can’t feel it. I think…I think it’s even healing.” Although she knew Spike loved warmth, he was indifferent to cold. Probably the icy water felt good on the burns. She endured it, shivering. “This is partly my fault. Willow told me, and I didn’t pass the warning along, not that you made it easy to tell you anything. And I got distracted, and forgot. Didn’t think it through, didn’t take it seriously enough. Willow knew you couldn’t channel. Something to do with your aura, I don’t know.” Buffy laid her cheek against his shoulder blade.  
  
“Always knew it,” Spike muttered. “Always knew I’d get accustomed to the light, get careless, get burned. Just in a flash, it was, wasn’t looking for it….”  
  
“It was something. Yesterday, when I wouldn’t…. Willow said you just shut down.”  
  
“Oh,” he said in a tone of puzzled discovery. “Something like, I suppose…. Not your fault, pet. You weren’t to know, and I didn’t know how else to ask, everybody there and watching, not be crying wolf, like you told me once, never to do that again--”  
  
It sank in, like the cold water Buffy didn’t really feel anymore, wasn’t even shivering, too distracted by the realization: yesterday in the kitchen, he’d really, truly needed her, a need as urgent as a mortal wound but too easily taken for an unimportant, untimely whim…and she hadn’t known it. Had flung away the nuisance without a moment’s consideration. Intent on her own concerns, she hadn’t _heard_ him at all, hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared.  
  
“I need diagrams,” she blurted, shaking against his chest. So he’d turned, was holding her, carefully petting her back, smoothing her soaked hair away from her face. He’d turned the water off, too, she noticed dimly. It didn’t help: the cold had settled inward, turned to ice. “With arrows and large print. I need somebody to whack me and make me pay attention. I should know when things are important, and I don’t. And I do the same dumb things over and over again--!”  
  
“Hush, now. Don’t fret yourself. Things are how they are. Don’t…don’t need you to be hovering, worrying about me--that’s what I have Bit for, innit? Just made me know…some things, is all. Made _me_ stop and consider. An’ that’s good, yeah? Know what I’m doing, like. Know what’s needed and what’s not, the best way I can help now.” Guiding her out of the shower enclosure, enfolding her in a huge dry towel, Spike went on, “Here, you’re chilled to the bone, hothouse flower, you are, need the warm….”  
  
Abruptly she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes. It was his human face…yet not. With the cream washed away, his sunburned features seemed one great radiant bruise, the browless, lashless blue eyes wide and surprised-seeming. “I need you to bite me. Right now. For--”  
  
“No, pet. Not a good thing now.”  
  
“For both of us. Do it!”  
  
“You can’t afford--”  
  
“Bite me!” Her fist was pounding against his chest. “What am I, that I can’t get a vampire to bite me?”  
  
“What use,” Spike countered quietly, “is a vampire who won’t bite you?”  
  
He stopped after that, as though it were a real question.  
  
If it was, she couldn’t take it in or make sense of it. Vampires bit people. It’s what they did. What they were. Otherwise, there’d be no need of a Slayer.  
  
She leaned into his embrace, let herself be held. Suddenly, she was exhausted and shuddering, feeling the only thing keeping her from shattering into a million pieces was Spike holding her together. “You’re what: a hundred and twenty-seven years old?”  
  
“Something like that.”  
  
“And I’m not. And right now, I feel that. I don’t understand, Spike. Tell me in simple words what you tried to tell me yesterday. I’ll try really, really hard to listen now.”  
  
“Most of it…doesn’t need saying anymore,” Spike said after a few moment’s silence. They were rocking, just a little, back and forth. “Just how things are. When you go to Quor’toth, love, I’m not coming with you, is all.” As she gazed at him wildly, he went on, “Best if I take care of what I can, here, so you’ll have someplace to come back to.”  
  
“But…but maybe we can never get back!”  
  
“Know that.”  
  
“But you can’t…can’t just abandon me!”  
  
“No. Know you got issues about that, makes you think that way. But no. If I could, I’d stop Fudo, open you a fucking portal to Quor’toth, shove you through, lead you back. But I can’t. Need a mage, and I’m not that. Need a warrior, a Champion of the Powers, and I’m not that either. Besides, you already got one of those. Doesn’t love you like I do, but likely you’d get used to each other again over time.”  
  
“No! I didn’t go through all this to be handed off to Mister bloody pigs’ blood like a door prize. Don’t you dare even think it!”  
  
“Knew you wouldn’t like it. But you’ll come to see it’s for the best.”  
  
“No! If you pull out, I’m not going either!”  
  
“If you say so,” Spike rejoined, much too mildly. “You’ll let down your Watcher, who’s desperate to rescue his mage, and Angel, just as desperate to pull out this _Destroyer_ , or whatever it is. ‘Course you will. If you say so.”  
  
“You watch me! I won’t, and nobody can make me! Besides, when we really get down to it, you’ll come. You always come!”  
  
“In one way of speaking, I surely do,” Spike said, trying to do his sexy eyebrow thing without any eyebrows, which didn’t work very well. Then the eyes in that alien face turned somber, resigned… _knowing._ “For the rest, the Slayer will decide.”  
  
**********  
  
_(This is all there is, there isn't anymore.)_

**Author's Note:**

> This is all there is of Nan Dibble's Blood Series.


End file.
